Last week for personal and professional reasons I was in the American liberal heartland: Burlington, VT and Cambridge, MA. On Saturday, before flying back to London, I had time to kill and went to a screening of Civil War at the big cinema on Boston Common.
Civil War is a fantasy woven from 21st century liberal anxiety, and it put me in mind of a different film from 60 years ago, also connected to the essential dilemma of modern liberalism: what are the consequences when you step away from rhetorical idealism to violent action.
Alex Garland’s film Civil War is a confused, brilliantly executed piece of work. It’s about an America that has finally descended into civil war, although the reasons for this are not stated clearly or even examined at all.
“Exposition is for wimps” is one of the guiding principles of contemporary screenwriting. Just hit people over the head with visuals and loudly mixed sound and they won’t need to know the how and why of a given situation. Garland does this from the beginning and the audience has to take it as given that the country has been at war with itself for a while and the rebels are closing in on Washington.
Who the President is, what party, is not specified but as he is in his third term and is revealed early on as vain, cowardly person liberals would be safe in assuming it is meant to be a Trump-like figure and the conspiracy minded MAGA crowd would not feel they were wrong that it is some jelly-kneed, anti-Second Amendment liberal.
But actually the film is less about CIVIL WAR and more about a coming of age, passing the torch story in which an older war photographer (the brilliant Kirsten Dunst) is befriended and turned into a mentor by a younger woman (Callee Spaeny). So there is a lot of foreign correspondent philosophizing about what we do, the morality of watching people be killed without intervening to save them and so on.
What is inauthentic is the absence of political discussion. Hacks spend hours discussing the politics of the situation they are risking their lives to tell you about: who are the good guys, who are the bad guys in a situation, which faction is loyal to which politician? We frequently refer to the protagonists by their first names because that kind of familiarity brings them down to our level.
None of this chat takes place in Civil War and it really should have.
But within its flaws it is a dynamic film. No one ever said writer/director Alex Garland couldn’t find shots. The main players are brilliantly framed even in the most dynamic battle action. He has done tremendous research on covering wars. There were scenes of approaching checkpoints and the kind of people you encounter at them that were accurate, if the ptsd memories they dredged up in me are anything to go by. Much of the film was shot in Appalachia which always reminds me of Bosnia (or Bosnia reminds me of lovely valleys in West Virginia) .
Jesse Plemons is uncanny as a checkpoint bully given the power of life and death by the fact of possessing an automatic weapon in a situation where there has been a total breakdown in chain of command and national authority.
The melodrama and the action are the reason the film found finance, obviously, but the absence of politics is intellectual and moral cowardice. America is in a state of cold civil war right now. The dysfunction in government and the rhetoric with which one side speaks of the other is frighteningly similar to what I observed in Northern Ireland and Bosnia. The fact that the US has not broken down into violent factions is a question I keep trying to answer . These circumstances should have been reflected in this drama. A film that framed the violence as a consequence of liberals finally taking action would have been a much braver piece of work.
Sitting in a cinema on Boston Common I was reminded of sitting in the Bala cinema just over the city line in suburban Philadelphia nearly sixty years ago and watching The Hill, directed by Sidney Lumet. The Hill starred Sean Connery — As you’ve never seen him before! the trailer promised — he was just past Goldfinger, his third James Bond film.
The Hill came out in autumn 1965 and I went to see it at a matinee. It was like a two-hour long punch in the face and it isn’t Connery’s performance that makes it stick in my memory, although I came out of it aspiring to live up to his, “I don’t give a damn there’s nothing you can do to hurt me” masculinity.
The Hill, from a script by Ray Rigby, is set in a British military prison in North Africa during WW2. In the middle of the stockade is a massive hill of sand built by the prisoners as a form of punishment and when they break regulations they are forced to run up and down it in full kit and packs under the African sun until they drop.
Connery is an army lifer who ends up a prisoner because he no longer buys into the mind-numbing discipline of the military.
The place is run by the guards. Abuse is rife and the psychopath in chief is Staff Sgt Williams played with sadistic gusto by Ian Hendry.
After much pain and death, the officers finally find their backbones and reform is on the way. Williams decides to give Connery one last beating. He is dragged off him by two of Connery’s cellmates and, out of shot, is heard being beaten himself, quite possibly to death. As Hendry shrieks in fear and pain, The camera focuses on Connery shouting at his comrades, “You’ll muck it up! Don’t punch him. We’ve won!” They don’t listen.
The intensity of that moment burned itself into my 15-year old mind. I found myself siding with those giving Hendry what he deserved. Why is Connery calling them off? Without some kind of justice delivered to the sadist what victory have the men won?
It was a question I think embedded in the times. Outside the Bala theatre, real-life Staff Sgt Harris types were acting with impunity. The Civil Rights era was at its bloody height. The year before the film came out James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner had been murdered in Mississippi while trying to help African Americans register to vote. A few months after the film came out Sherriff Bull Connor unleashed dogs, water cannons and riot police on Martin Luther King and hundreds of non-violent protestors marching from Selma to Mongomery Alabama. More people were killed.
The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice, Dr. King said. But there are many corpses strewn along the way, including that of Martin Luther King.
And murderers walk free.
In the 60s we understood this was the problem of liberalism. The imperfect reach of justice in a power structure that is basically unchanged.
Another part of the social mise-en-scene in which I first saw The Hill: The Civil Rights movement was about to split apart — even as the Voting Rights Act became law — between those who wanted to continue with non-violent action and those who had taken enough blows and were demanding greater militancy. In my mind this echoed the split between Connery and his cellmates.
As the 60s unfolded and I started taking it to the streets and my rhetoric against my country became more militant, my father would say to me, “Work within the system, son.” His words didn’t make much impact.
Over the years when The Hill turned up on television I would always try to watch. It isn’t a great film but the question raised by the final scene nagged at me and I thought this time if I watch it I will understand Connery’s behaviour. By the time I was in my 20s and living the acting life in New York I knew the name of the director, Sidney Lumet. And at that same moment, the 1970s, Lumet was making the quartet of films that record the truth of my native city and would cement his reputation: Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network and Prince of the City.
All, one way or another, were about this dilemma of liberalism. All, one way or another, were about trying to work within the system, reform from within, no matter the personal cost.
Maybe it was a generational thing
Sidney Lumet was a year younger than my Dad. Age, New York, and New Deal liberalism were all they had in common. Lumet’s parents were actors in the Yiddish theatre. He would later recall his father as a man of real talent who was never able to make the transition to the mainstream because he couldn’t shed his Yiddish accent. Lumet, on the other hand, had no such problem and started working on the stage as a child. The photos don’t lie. He was a very cute little guy. He made his Broadway debut in 1935 at the age of 11 in Dead End.
Dead End is a slice of social realism about life in the New York slums. The action centers on a group of street urchins living in tenements just below Sutton Place, a very posh neighbourhood, by the East River. 11-year old Sidney Lumet played one of the urchins.
Lumet did other film and stage work until World War 2. Then came Army service. When the war ended he mustered out into a new age, where New York was the world centre of culture, particularly the theatre. He inevitably hooked up with the Actors Studio shortly after it opened in 1947. So many of the people who had been part of his pre-war acting world — members ot the Group Theatre — were part of the scene there.
The Actor’s Studio as has been repeated a thousand times was all about Stanislavski’s acting technique but it was also about a political and social esthetic. That esthetic had grown out of the social realism of the 1930s in response to the Great Depression.
Stanislavski’s technique trained actors to bring the “truth of life” to their performances. Now in the post-war era, the Studio was continuing that tradition. Stanislavsky, as my teacher Stella Adler reminded us, said that part of our training was to be politically aware. We used our empathic intelligence to understand why characters in plays behaved in certain ways. In the years after the war, when Arthur Miller and Tennesee Williams dominated, and the kitchen in a tenement complete with sink was the mise-en-scene of many dramas the politics of actors, writers and directors was empathetically left-wing — although I’m not sure that “empathy” was a political term of art back then.
There was also continuity with the politics of the Group. In the years before the war many of the actors were involved in anti-fascist activities organized by the Communist party. And when the post-war communist witch hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Unamerican Activities Committee began in earnest, a lot of people connected to the Studio had problems. Most prominent were the Studio’s founder, Elia Kazan, who directed the original production of Death of a Salesman, and Lee J. Cobb, who had originated the role of Willy Loman.
In 1951 Cobb was blacklisted for refusing to name names of people who might have been members of the Communist Party to HUAC. No one would hire him, in two years he went from creating one of the most important roles in 20th century theatre to unemployable and broke. Banks wouldn’t lend him money, friends had to be circumspect in seeing him because the FBI tailed Cobb wherever he went. His wife had a complete mental breakdown from the strain and had to be institutionalised.
Eventually Cobb named names, so did Kazan. Others didn’t. Lumet was tangentially involved and ultimately confronted by FBI agents looking for dirt on somebody else. Lumet remembered walking to the meeting thinking the career he had just got going was about to be taken away from him. But in the end nothing came of his interaction with the not so secret police.
And his career really was going well. There was a new medium for telling dramatic stories: television. Lumet had the door opened for him by a pal, Yul Brynner, not the King of Siam yet but a jobbing director in the new medium.
Lumet directed everything including one of the first TV programmes I remember with clarity: You Are There. It took an historical event, everything from the Death of Socrates to the Battle of Hastings to the Gettysburg Address, and reported it as a live news story with reporters in contemporary dress interviewing characters about the events as they unfolded.
The show offered a haven for blacklisted writers if they were willing to work uncredited. And many did.
I wonder what impact living through the paranoid intensity of the McCarthy era had on Lumet’s sensibility. How did surviving the witch hunts and building a thriving career shape the way he directed Al Pacino and Treat Williams through the moral and political complexity of their roles in Serpico and Prince of the City?
Like Connery in The Hill they wear a uniform but have become disgusted by the corruption that it hides. They risk their lives and fortunes to bring about reform, but remain committed to the system. They are betrayed over and over by those encouraging them to come forward. Some rotten cops are punished, the system carries on.
Nearly sixty years after I first saw The Hill, in an America on fire — literally, the Watts riot in Los Angeles which would leave 14 people dead took place a few weeks before I saw it — I found myself sitting in a theatre watching Civil War and I’m still thinking of the dilemma of liberalism.
When do people finally say enough is enough and what are the consequences that flow from that decision?