"What's The Movie Trying to Say?" - Art as Experience & Communication

Amid the headlines, Letterboxd reviews, and subjective reactions I've read and heard about Alex Garland's Civil War, one phrase has reverberated again and again from the folks who were less than satisfied with it: "The movie had nothing to say." According to the more critical camp, the film is spineless and devoid of meaning or message; The Critical Drinker's review is called "Civil War: Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing." Another negative review was titled "Civil War and The Art of Saying Nothing." Still more headlines said "Dystopian 'Civil War' presents images but says nothing with them" and "Civil War well-crafted but has nothing to say." The phrase has come up so often that it's almost reaching Groundhog Day levels of parody for me; it feels like every time I open up Letterboxd or YouTube, there's another take employing the exact same wording. Did everybody get a certain memo about approved verbiage that I didn't? Surely, however, the universality of this sentiment must express something real.

I've already written about what I think Civil War is saying—and in fact, I think it's saying quite a lot. Part of the subversion is that it's just not saying what people expected it to say—nor is it about what people expected it to be about. In my eyes, the film is far more of a Whiplash-esque cautionary tale about purpose (and art) consuming your humanity than a story exclusively about the American political landscape. For me, that decision gives the film a far more universal human quality than if it had simply been about our current moment. It's also layered and complicated; far from being "a love letter to journalists," Garland's story challenges the notion of impartiality and highlights how supposedly apolitical public servants can still unwittingly contribute to violence and propaganda due to grim external realities and thorny personal motivations.

Despite all this, the fact that we're all debating what Civil War is about (if anything) does demonstrate that it was not exactly effective as universally communicating a "message" that the entire audience was able to intuit. Is that proof that it's truly thought-provoking art, capable of being discussed and interpreted? Or is it a sign that the film is messy and amateurish in its conveyance of ideas, too noncommittal to proclaim anything with clarity?

I'm less interested in writing more about Garland's movie here; the question that has been truly fascinating to me has been why this particular movie has inspired this particular reaction and expectation from audiences—and whether it's a reasonable expectation to have for art in the first place.

The primary thought I've had in the last few days has been about how strange it would be to see these headlines being written about any other big recent movie: "Romantic comedy Anyone But You presents images but says nothing with them" or "Godzilla X Kong is well-crafted but has nothing to say." Can you imagine a headline like, "WONKA is at the top of the box office, but what is it trying to say?" In the context of a different movie in a different genre, your first question might be, "why are people so concerned with what it's saying?" It's not an unreasonable question, but it does feel like a strange one to obsess about.

The discernible distinction here, of course, is that the subject of Civil War is different—and quite a bit more serious—than the latest romantic comedy or fun musical. The film bears (and claims) the bold weight of calling itself Civil War; thus far, no one else has attempted to make the definitive big-budget thriller about a modern civil war in America. That's a huge mantle to take on, and one that almost certainly comes with its own baggage of expectations—along with audience cynicism.

When I first saw the trailer for Civil War in IMAX back in February, I couldn't help but roll my eyes. I heard other people in the theater audibly groan when the title card hit. It felt, on an instinctive level, like "do we really need this right now?" And to be honest, the trailer really stressed me out; here I was sitting in the movie theater to escape the real world for a little while, and then I was suddenly and distressingly presented with images that felt unsettlingly close to the reality we all dread. I suspect that others had this reaction as well—which means that for people seeing the film, there was probably an instinctive sense that it needed to prove itself worthy of their attention and respect...perhaps, even, by saying something that they could get behind. Either way, the suspicion was palpable and the walls were already up.

It's almost as if, confronted with a controversial movie none of us exactly asked for, we've all responded with a variation on Jesse Plemons' now-iconic line from the film itself: "Okay. What kind of [movie] are you?"

Reading these headlines, I've been torn about whether it's reasonable to expect a film like Civil War to have "something to say" within our current conversation. On the one hand, art is communication; there is no work which truly communicates nothing, and even "saying nothing" is saying something. On the other hand, art is also experience. To enter a film hyper-sensitive to the message it's trying to preach or the "statement" it's trying to make is to prevent oneself from actually experiencing the art as a story on its own terms.

Growing up in the Bible Belt in the early 2000s, I was well-acquainted with people who looked at every work of art as a vessel for a message—and tried to read and discern the message from every story before it was even given a chance. Many Evangelicals I knew would do this with Disney movies and anything else from "liberal Hollywood," searching for the "agenda" at play before they would allow their kids to see it. One mother I remember said that Tangled was "preaching an agenda" about how it's good to disobey your parents, because Rapunzel runs away from the tower she's been imprisoned in. (She neglected to observe or care, of course, that Mother Gothel isn't even Rapunzel's real parent!) Those same Christians would praise movies like God's Not Dead—not because the art was excellent, but because it was conveying a message that they fundamentally agreed with.

Perhaps more surprisingly, though, I saw this same instinct in how many Christians would interpret The Bible. The "liberal Hollywood" cynicism was not present, but the search for the "agenda" was even stronger. Every story in scripture was treated as an opportunity for a "practical takeaway" or a moralistic lesson; rather than simply marveling at the way God parted the Red Sea or Jesus healed a paralytic man, the focus was immediately shifted toward the message we should take from these stories and how it should impact our daily life.

That's not to say that I think any story is without takeaway; there's a good deal of meaning to observe from every miracle in The Bible and every good novel you've ever read. Even Jesus told parables with explicit underlying sentiments being expressed through them; the story of The Good Samaritan pretty overtly calls out the hypocritical religious callousness for those we perceive as lesser. But these easy "messages" are not the "point" of Christ's parables. The folks at The Bible Project said, "Jesus didn't tell parables to make everything clear. Rather, he wanted to provoke the imagination—and invite people to see what God is doing in the world from a new perspective." In the parables of Jesus, meaning can be discovered—but the story must first be experienced and felt; the meaning lies in what exactly it made us feel. The true purpose of both the parables and the stories in the wider Bible is not a message but an image—an image which, when pondered and internalized throughout a lifetime, can shape the heart and the moral imagination.

It's ironic to return to the concept of image, because that's exactly what Civil War is exploring. Garland's hope, it seems to me, is that we will see these images of war-torn destruction on our own soil and feel compelled to turn away from them. This is an interesting goal, since it parallels the goal of Kirsten Dunst's character in the film: sending photos from foreign conflicts back to her homeland to tell people, "don't do this." In the case of her character, that modus operandi clearly has not worked out for her—and indeed, the movie highlights how a photographer's supposedly cautionary images can actually serve to reinforce what people already want and the causes they're already pursuing. Sometimes what a photographer sees as horrific, an observer sees as aspirational. In this sense, I perceive parts of the film as Garland condemning himself, not knowing if the images he's displaying will indeed serve as warnings or whether they'll simply further trivialize the horror. For better or worse, they certainly provoke the imagination—and for me, they got me to think more seriously about the intense responsibility of image-makers like myself.

Art is experience and art is communication. Both of these things are true—and I suspect they may need to be carefully held in tension together. It's not wrong to ask what a story is communicating, or to try to unpack the meaning it intends to convey; indeed, in the best case scenario, that question can be a sign that we're taking the art seriously. But when we jump to communication before even allowing the possibility of experience, I think we miss a crucial aspect of the communication: not just what it says, but how it makes us feel. From the reviews I've read of Civil War, it seems like many viewers went into the film determined to unravel the ideological "sides" of the fictional conflict, the geopolitical reasons it started, and the partisan political statement Garland was attempting to make through this constructed reality. They did not take the film on its own terms, as an experience first. Others are bound to disagree, but my experience of watching Civil War was a gripping and affecting one. When the credits rolled, I felt deeply convicted and haunted—and I wasn't even quite sure why. Unpacking my feelings in the days that followed allowed me to tap into what I understood the film to be communicating. But that didn't come right away.

Perhaps, for some of us, the story of Civil War hits too close to home for us to simply take it as a story. Maybe that's why we've jumped to the meaning and interpretation so quickly; it feels too real and too present-tense to just watch like any other piece of fiction. That's fair enough, and I think it's also reasonable to have fully accepted the film as a story and found it to be lacking in that respect. My greater wish is that on a broader artistic level, we'll avoid living in the Bible Belt; art must be experience before it can be agenda.