Review of Alex Garland's Civil War (2024)
Hate has a home here
The sheer volume of Spector-esque “wall of media” that accompanied the release of Civil War is remarkable, a relentless harmonic pounding: that Civil War doesn’t pick sides, that it’s laden with nuance and ambiguity along the lines of ex-auteur Alex Garland’s earlier work (which I have discussed at length), unbiased, apolitical, a film for big boys who don’t need a lecture! Daubing blood from eardrums, critics on the right hummed along to this tune, intimidated by the gush of ten cent words from their leftist counterparts.
But the wall of media is a lie as always, the louder the bigger. Civil War is a repulsive blood libel of America itself, even if Garland cloaks his hatred in secret color coding. Early on we get our first cue:
Barely listenable jazz plays in the background as a MAGA terrorist runs to suicide bomb a truck distributing food to the homeless, red white and blue the symbol of pure evil. This opens the film.
“Good” characters are identified with pink, yellow, and teal, for these are more nuanced, more adult in the room, more aligned with the orgy of self-destruction that is modern marxism.
Garland’s masters - MI6 with Chinese funding, for Garland is an activated product of the UK deep state - have long struggled with how to control a population once their march through the institutions is complete, patriotism (“LAST REFUGE OF A SCOUNDREL LOL YOUR OWN GUY SAID THAT”) having been replaced by self-loathing. The uniformed non-entities inhabiting Civil War are meant as role model for actual troops: these guys here look like Black Hawk Down and they’re killing MAGA, you can do it too, Private!
Through the Civil War looking glass, a patriotic MAGA type is akshually like an Islamist suicide bomber, as above, but worse.
MAGA are akshually like Pol Pot, if you got a problem with communism, well, take it out on Jessie Plemons, everyone’s favorite Breaking Bad nazi, here stacking the bodies of illegal immigrants just like Trump wants to do in his chilling Project 2025:
Plemons is building a nice career for himself as head-scratching nazi, thoughtful puzzlement an amusing reprieve from the sneering sadism which is all most actors can muster up when donning their SS uniform for another thin metaphor about republicans.
In Breaking Bad he’d be puzzling over how to impress Walter and become a top criminal. In Civil War, his motivation is to fill a hole with some foreigner corpses. Hong Kong, you say? You look like a Chinaman to me - we MAGA hate without nuance:
An important message from Chinese funders to satellite nations: no one, especially not Trump, is coming to save you from us - they can’t even tell the difference. It’s an awkward shoehorning, unlike Garland’s fully ChiCom funded Dredd, which brilliantly drove home the message: Resistance is Futile.
Plemons’ Pol Pot Jr. is pretty cool next to this MAGA, here staring stupidly at a young girls ass:
Catch the red white and blue or is it too subtle? HOW ABOUT THIS THEN, YOU IDIOT:
Do you see now how American Patriotism leads to torturing the smart kids from your high school and raping young girls? The flag has LITERALLY TAKEN HIS HEAD. He is a piece of meat, an unhuman.
“It’s really a film about why polarization is not a great thing,” Garland intones, reading from a script provided by his MI-6 wife, as she holds a gun to his head. His next project will be yet another Frida Kahlo biography that she has foisted on him.
0 stars
Addendum (rejected by the editor):
As a youth, Paloma Baeza dreamed of being an artist. After some frustration, in an effort to evade the dawning realization that she lacked talent, and with guidance from eager revolutionary professors, Paloma studied Frida Kahla - history’s most acclaimed artist of no talent. Through Frida’s crude Marxist lens, Paloma learned the subjectivity of art, that there is no talent per se, that artistry, like everything, is an appointment of political power to be imposed upon an oppressed proletariat.
That was freshman year at the University of Bristol.
Sophomoric wisdom consisted of the revelation that she was branded with “intersectionality”, blending femininity with exotic foreign genes, a better proof of worth than so-called “talent”. She adopted the last name of her father, a Mexican man she’d never met, who her forward-thinking mother had chosen specifically to inject genetic Otherness into her offspring, an insurance policy versus the vicious modern cycle of Marxist balkanization.
Junior year she drifted into theatre, hoping to fake her way to the top while despairing of success in the Saw torture chamber carefully designed by those sadistic Christian right-wingers who, she’d been duly taught, puppeteer the globe. She did a bunch of drugs and tried to fuck a bunch of self-loathing white dudes, but most of them couldn’t get a hard-on. She nearly committed suicide in a grand gesture about the pointlessness of it all. She didn’t really even look Mexican, and her eyebrows were not bushy at all.
Her mother, concerned about this descent, reached out to contacts at the University and arranged a faculty adviser - an “ex” MI6 agent acting as deep state recruiter - who would help Paloma adapt and understand the Real World. Little by little, Paloma was brought to understand the great Hegelian upending of the colonial order which had been secretly progressing for 100 years, victim and oppressor having long since switched roles in a bloodless and undocumented revolution. Introductions were made. Journalism majors still working out how the sausage of Christo-Fascist bogeymen is made. Future health care professionals toying with medical experiments on irredeemable political foes. Linguistics experts to sharpen the tongue with weaponized grammar divorced from reality. A psych grad student was brought in for long sessions in which Paloma came to internalize the power dynamic of life and, if not embrace her new role as intersectional nobility, at least accept the inevitability and justice of the new order - enough to flourish in it’s fecund soil.
She was also introduced to a high-cheekboned chameleon of a drama major, Cillian Murphy. Handsome, charming, and without sexual inhibition, Cillian seemed too good to be true - and when Paloma caught him sleeping with an elderly Hollywood producer, he admitted to being a sort of male Geisha, MI6-trained to turn out and compromise those deemed Potentially Influential.
No, no, Paloma was not one of these targets - though he’d thoroughly dredged dark fantasies from her, and recorded their exploration through some very explicit and dirty role-playing, but he was certain there’d be no need of HER exposure. Rather, she’d been tapped for HIS job, or a new variant that the Community were sure would be of vast importance: the sexual enslavement of top artists (yes, talent IS real, naked envy your motivation, but you knew that already, darling).
After graduation, Paloma was sent to the MI6-captured National Film and Television School - she would start her career as an actress, with guaranteed roles on British State TV, years spent mastering facial muscles, motives hidden behind the facade of a role, while she carefully developed her own character: oppressed bipoc girl forced to be on-screen sexy while the boys mainsplain from their director’s perch. “Paloma” had the revolutionary Frida Kahlo beaten out of her by white male oppressors, but she took it all philosophically, even meekly, unable to resist more of the same from her white male oppressor. This character even enjoys role-playing subjugated minority , begging her partner to get into the role of violent racist. Cillian warned her: “hardest one to get them to agree to”, but Paloma managed to make their test encounters go well enough to earn a Masters in Covert Psyops.
The NFTS or whatever isn’t ALL spies - just most of the faculty. Students of talent ARE brought in and groomed to a fantasy life in which ability combined with hard work guarantees reward, while being simultaneously made to feel guilt for their privilege. Alex Garland was one of those, a man of ideas, who wrote compelling stories unbound by imposed narrative, and who seemed to have the vision to realize his ideas in the difficult medium of film.
Unbeknownst to Garland, his advisor and mentor, Alexander MacDonald, was an “ex” MI-6 agent, charged with grooming long-term prospects in the film industry, given his own film studio to achieve this end.
MacDonald fretted over Garland as with all his protegees. The creation of great art requires a laissez-faire approach which leads to a dangerous sense of independence on the part of the artist, in direct contradiction to the goal of the program. Reining the artist in is a delicate process with the potential to snuff out his creative fire, leaving a shell of a propagandist suited only for after-school special anti-racism productions. The “liberated” artist must be allowed to generate enough material to amass a style and a vast reach, only then to begin a carefully purposing to The Communities’ strategic needs - preferably without the target’s knowledge! Only a master of psychology can make human puppets dance thus!
Ahh, who will write MY history? whines MacDonald when in his cups. The man is a hidden figure too smart for the spotlight, ever balancing the scales between entertainment and propaganda, the one fueling the other and vice versa. He is the UK’s part of operation Harvey Weinstein, which devoured the film industry and auctioned the remains to the ChiComs.
Rising from the popular degeneracy-fest Trainspotting, MacDonald’s cutout studio DNA Films allowed the likes of Danny Boyle to make bold (if drug-addled) choices in low budget, maximizing profits while allowing unfettered artistic expression of the modern sort. When Boyle wouldn’t rise from his stupor to write another shitty film, MacDonald tapped Garland, who promptly shat out 28 Days Later.
MacDonald, ever hovering over the 5d chessboard, installed his ringer Cillian Murphy in the starring role, designer cheekbones lovingly framed, the very bait that would ultimately capture Christopher Nolan and lead him to his doom in Oppenheimer.
MacDonald’s aspiring young deep-staters dutifully crowd his palatial flat each Friday night for reinforcement of ideological consensus, sex, and drugs. At these parties, Paloma Paeza quickly identified in Garland an ideal host from which she could bleed talent, untamed, raw, yet susceptible to the character she’d developed. This was the mission she’d trained for: to harness Garland’s talent and purpose it to the Narrative, using all voluntary means at her disposal, with compromise as last resort.
She dug in with aplomb - weaving a facade of Otherness from the safety of a typical British girl with vaguely ethnic appearance and super ethnic name as proof of authenticity. She granted the naively altruistic Garland moral exemption from the guilt of existence, with bonus membership to the indigenous peoples club. He learned to politely ridicule British Mexican food, in Spanish. She soaked in his writing, struggling to understand it so as to exploit it, unwilling to be fully activated by her MI6 masters - yet.
Instead, Paloma showed for Garland a focus on her own “stupid” projects, allowing him to effortlessly improve on them while blushing at his unwarranted compliments. Escalating depravities with multiple partners of questionable age were arranged and documented. She celebrated his successes, suffering her own failures with noble Latinx stoicism, ever worshipful of her Cortez, her interloper, her slavemaster: “No, don’t hit me sir, I will do better! Just don’t beat me any more! (come on, really hit me! Harder! Madre de dios, si!)”
Compromise, a simple collection from the virile male artist in bloom, willing to try anything once for the sake of his craft. It is ever thus.
Not that blackmail was necessary. An independent Garland created a valuable illusion of artistic integrity for MI6’s DNA Films, just as Weinstein leveraged house auteur Quentin Tarantino into countless blowjobs from future Oscar winning actresses. But favors were asked, once in a while, with subtle assistance from the implant, Paloma. Garland freely granted valuable scraps of his writing to boost this or that MacDonald protegee, no credit required, but on Garland’s terms, from whatever rumination moved him. For a while, this was enough.
Still, pressure mounted on MacDonald from impatient ChiCom paymasters. They wanted Quentin Tarantino to visit China for photo ops, partying, and compromise operations. MacDonald deftly sold them Garland, who has the sort of look that makes mass murdering ChiCom man-children feel like they’re in a John Wayne movie, for one glorious night on the town. “Use your man voice,” Garland’s mentor intoned on the eve of his first China junket. “Speak from the diaphragm.”
Though he never fucked the children they sent to his hotel room, and being a novelty act to a bunch of grinning psychopaths shook him up more than a bit, Garland was impressed by a certain Minister of Culture who shared a shockingly sophisticated philosophy of “less words, more picture” as a universal language transcending national boundary. Unbeknownst to Garland, of course, this pitch had been developed by MI6 agents (including Baeza and MacDonald) to cater to naive artists like him.
And so Garland was tasked with writing Dredd, from the graphic novel, a simple action movie easily understood without sound, with little message other than perhaps: obey or DIE. He took up the challenge and more, when another MacDonald asset, the untalented but easily compromised director Pete Travis, got permanently lost in an opium den on one of these junkets.
Maintaining a vestige of creative control is difficult in these situations, and to his credit Garland fought and threatened to quit and raged the film into a masterpiece. But friction formed between Alex, Paloma, and Kevin, as he began to make out murky outlines of power behind the strings which deterministically bound. Feeling dirty, he refused director credit, snubbed MacDonald’s parties, and chilled toward his wife.
Secret meetings were held. MacDonald advised the blackmail card but Paloma proposed conferring one-time autonomy to her husband to allow him to produce a screenplay he’d written called Ex Machina: a complete, ready to film, low budget labor of love. Not a blockbuster, but guaranteed profit and more important, a happily evasive auteur primed for the next project.
Given the wild success of Dredd (misreported as failure thanks to ChiCom accounting), the auteur would be indulged. Budget arbitrarily increased. Media assets programmed to fawn over the golden boy of Cinema, throwing themselves vagina-first in his direction. Awards granted with abandon. Now-legendary asset Oscar Isaac activated to subtly gauge Garland’s commitment to the Struggle while delivering a legitimately great performance.
But Ex Machina, despite it’s brilliance, perplexed and angered the ChiComs, who now thought of Garland as their pet and demanded micromanagement of his next project: the utter shitshow Annihilation, an environmentalist propaganda assignment that he was unable to finish and unwilling to direct. Feeling she’d finally mastered his tricks, and maybe there wasn’t so much to be envious about after all, Paloma took the writing over, and offered a scathing lecture about all the amazing opportunities she’d been denied, while everything just fell into his privileged lap. Shamed into the director’s chair, he slouched through the thing - barely. In the end, more money had to be spent scrubbing the internet of negative reviews than the film cost, but China would not bear the public humiliation of a flop (unless the film succeeds of course).
In the quiet after a release politely ignored by the public, days on end spent agonizing, Garland reached a decision: bipoc or no, kids or no, he had to divorce himself from this sadistic parasite Paloma Baeza. The thought made him tremble in fear, but why? Perhaps he feared an imminent demise of dramatic irony, as Paloma would gleefully deny his request by producing the long-dormant blackmail, 3somes with a young-looking girl who called them mommy and daddy and acted so perfectly traumatized, any slippage of role play lost in jump cuts. And more, as I have painstakingly detailed.
The choice now made clear: accept a gilded cage and MI6/ChiCom masters, or be branded a pedo and suffer ostracization at best, likely worse.
He chose to attempt suicide, unaware of the extent of state surveillance, his minders sending a swarm of agents to disarm him before he finished loading the gun.
At last, the time had come for a more ruthless honesty. Paloma explained to him and made sure he understood she meant it: any future resistance to the agenda would be countered with the gruesome murder of one of their children - elites like Elijah Wood and Jake Gyllenhall line up to pay for the privilege of generating this sort of compromise, proof of Party loyalty, guarantor of success, and a rare sadistic delight in one.
The illusion shattered, and little remains of Alex Garland but a shell. His ideas are forgotten, his creative fire rudely snuffed. He is now forced to try and make Paloma’s dream, another reimaging of Frida Kahlo, into an impossible reality. He must help with her amateur stop-motion animation projects and clap as she wins bipoc of the year at awards shows. He must watch as she sucks Oscar Isaac’s enormous penis, while being forced to display his own shriveled manhood for their amusement. This and more.
All things become tolerable with time. Maybe you even chub up a bit when Oscar Isaac comes by Friday nights to laugh at you while helicoptering his schlong. You spin valid-sounding theories on why you deserve to be left a husk by this creature of envy bent on sucking your talent from you, and eventually the theories are internalized enough to allow the maintenance of your sanity, even if you are forever changed for the worse.
As Paloma takes it out on Alex, so Alex subconsciously casted about for his own target, gobbling at “insurrection” slop served up in the TV trough, ready-made scapegoats, Trumpist goons, MAGAts, subhumans, various mindless creatures united in thrall to the greatest threat to democracy to ever exist - Donald J. Trump. Elite Brits are generally desperate to reinforce their sense of worldly sophistication - the very fount of their fragile self-esteem - by sneering at these sorts of tailored caricatures of American rubes, stand-ins for capitalism who allow the cultured Marxist to evade the horrors of their ideology with smug self-satisfaction even as Rome burns bright just outside the window. For these reasons, and more importantly the added subconscious psychological defense against Paloma’s depredations, Garland projected his frusatration at the orange man on the tele.
By now aware that January 6th was a psyop, an optic, the agitators confidential informants led by FBI agents, CIA-trained eastern european (actual) nazis, Soros-funded antifa disguised as media, this last a favorite tactic of MI-6 to gin up unrest in France when the mood strikes. Combining these elements and others, January 6th was a sort of showcase for the entire globalist Community, who gathered in an attempt to end the capitalist scourge once and for all by inciting MAGA to mass violence and death, hopefully to discredit the American concept of political freedom for good.
Paloma’s sadism had at last rubbed off. Garland took pleasure in seeing innocent people sentenced to 10, 15, 20 years, based on a still frame from an MI-6 operative out of context. The show trials, the arbitrary sentencing, orchestrators unidentified and unscathed. Political opposition crushed by any means necessary. Thrilling and dangerous revolutionary realpolitik. He got to meet luminaries like Michiel Vos, son-in-law of Nancy Pelosi and coincident HBO producer, famed creator of the QAnon Shaman character:
Michiel Vos with his trained antifa monkey
Along with other artists unknown to the public: “NW Scaffold Commander”, “Gallows Builder” and so many more! The dawn of an exciting new art form, a heavy-handed Reality TV production as answer to the popular rejection of Marxist propaganda in fictional entertainment.
But the production was flawed, as all the combined efforts of a dozen color revolution operations were not enough to incite actual MAGA to the planned bloodbath. The narrative was weak enough to cause defection of the less cynical leftist intellectuals. The Fedsurrection counter-narrative swelled through cracks in the mainstream, Year Zero and all its horror exposed to daylight from the interior of a DC courtroom. The masses refused to be cowed into submission, opposition to the Narrative growing with every innocent sentenced to re-education, de-banking, no-fly-lists, ostracization, and lengthy prison terms. An unnerved deep state cognoscenti, fearful of reprisal but wholly committed to the psyop, asses plainly visible, wracked their brains for ways to cement the narrative in too many stupid ways to count.
Alex Garland, transformation from independent thinker to drooling enthusiast of human suffering now complete, professed eagerness to put his diminished talents to use versus MAGA in the propaganda war. Paloma had developed a Trump murder fantasy called Civil War, which MacDonald had rejected as overly divisive. Together, Garland and Baeza would rewrite it but cleverer,
etc.