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The real enemy the film targets—more so
than any of the war’s factions or their real-world inspirations—is
polarization. Here again, Garland has laid out his message explicitly. “Left
and right are ideological arguments about how to run a state,” he said at SXSW. “You try one, and
if that doesn’t work out, you vote it out, and you try again a different way.
That’s a process. But we’ve made it into ‘good and bad.’ We made it into a
moral issue, and it’s fucking idiotic, and incredibly dangerous.” He later clarified that social issues don’t
factor at all into his understanding of the left and right, which is limited to
the question of whether governments should have “low taxation to stimulate
economic growth, or high taxation to help disadvantaged people via educational
welfare.”

The fact that both sides would take issue
with that binary aside, the moral values and principles we bring to our
politics—the moral values and principles that, with the exception of the
Plemons scene, Garland tries to make absent in Civil War—are, more often
than not, the basis upon which we decide what it means for policies to “work
out” in the first place. They are also the only plausible basis for the
questions Lee hopes her journalism—which is not about tax policy—will provoke.
When we see images of men who’ve been strung up and tortured, the questions
that come to mind, whether we appreciate it or not, are about human dignity—the
fundamental respect for our persons we may or may not be entitled to as human
beings and what, if anything, could possibly justify denying it. And the way we
answer those questions does, inevitably, bleed into the way we handle our taxes—the
way we decide who’s worthy of our investment and who the truly disadvantaged
are to begin with. 

As Garland surely understands on some
level, the way we answer those questions even determines the extent to which we
value a free press and democracy itself. Though Civil War’s script was
completed before January 6, he’s said the attack on the Capitol inspired and
fueled its production. “What I had was this incredibly intense feeling that
this is a disgrace,” he told the Associated Press. “Later,
as time went by, some of that anger fed into the project.” But anger at whom,
exactly? The film and all he’s said about it imply, correctly, that Donald
Trump and what he’s wrought are symptoms of divisions that preceded him. But it’s
intentionally mute on the nature of those divisions and how they came about.