I’ll try to get straight to the point. More than a film on the documentary value of war images (I would rather say the opposite), on the need to photograph horror as an instrument for the possible awakening of a collective conscience (not really), on the fear of a free-for-all that would Civil War a work on the extreme consequences of an increasingly polarized public debate (and this as a premise would be ok, even according to the director himself, but anticipating that the film avoids any political interpretation), Alex Garland’s latest film seems to me not even a reflection too veiled on the reduction in the image of the Other. On the result of a continuous expulsion of the different, on its stylization and cloning which would have led the United States to split in two in a civil war of which we know nothing except that there are two factions against each other: after all, who needs motivation for a war if the participants themselves do they reject all complexity (“someone wants to kill us, and we want to kill them”)? This is nothing new if we think that Garland became obsessed with clones, balancing his career behind the camera around the relationship between copy and original: it was not Ex Machina a film about the ability of a rendered robotic figure in our image and likeness to deceive us by providing us with a false mirror? It was not Annihilation a film about the body that rebels against itself (in the tumor, in the doppelgänger that each of us carries with us), as if it had its own autonomy? And again: it wasn’t Devs a TV series about the elusiveness of a clone-image, that of a deceased daughter, incapable of resurrecting in the way in which the memory of a father kept her alive? Upon closer inspection, even the mistreated (sigh!) Men it is a film about the reduction into the image of the other: that of a man, a male, who becomes a simulacrum of all men, and therefore a dark, protean, carcinogenic, horrifying, violent and cursed image, capable of self-regenerating in a different but always threatening in front of the eyes of a terrified woman?
Here too, in Civil Warmen seem to have disappeared in favor of a series of flat character, deliberately flat characters, mere functions, series of attributes for eyes that need to instantly define who or what is in front of them, but without actually taking them into consideration. They are the protagonists, and therefore they are our eyes, but are we sure we really want to look through these eyes which, essentially, see nothing except icons (flags and nothing more) without any depth? Choose your pair of glasses: those of a photojournalist totally desensitized to violent images, so much so that she asks an armed man to pose under two hanged bodies, or those of a little girl who has always mythologized her, but still capable of photographing her afterwards having (involuntarily?) made her die (as a heroine, in any case, she will be replaceable with her clone, a photojournalist of the same name that the girl herself warns us about at the beginning of the film), in a progressive entry into the world of images that forget their referents? We are in the mirror world, gentlemen. That mirror world to which Naomi Klein dedicated her latest essay Double. My journey into the Mirror Worldthat world in which “there is always a narrative and an imitative response” (again: “someone wants to kill us, and we want to kill them”), an America “where fiction is reality, […] where you are not even able to recognize yourself.” The essay, not surprisingly, starts from a story of doubles to drag us into a world where the other is demonized regardless, where everything is confused and everything is the reverse of itself, its negative (to stick to a beautiful film sequence). Like a military man asking “what kind of American are you?” to decide on the life or death of a person; like a journalist who, in the President who dies, killed in cold blood, does not see a man but the possibility of a statement that gives meaning to his journey. There is no ideology but only symbols, mirrors and images emptied of meaning. The aesthetics of a war in which everything revolves around the images of death, the claim of an iconography of reality, but where, as in Fury by David Ayer, the shots are shaped like laser beams of Star Wars. The Clone Wars, Therefore? Well, why not?
