(Los Angeles) In the near future, Americans face each other in a second bloody civil war: if Civil War is a fiction, the film wants to launch the debate on populism and the growing schism within American society.
Previewed last week at the SXSW festival, the film is released in American theaters on April 12 and tells the story of a president faced with secession from California and Texas.
Lead actress Kirsten Dunst plays a journalist navigating a fractured society, where the FBI has been dismantled and military drones are attacking American civilians.
PHOTO JACK PLUNKETT, INVISION ARCHIVES, PROVIDED BY ASSOCIATED PRESS
Kirsten Dunst
For the magazine The Atlanticthe film “resonates uncomfortably” with the current political scene marked by division.
But is this scenario plausible?
Donald Trump was criticized recently for joking that he would be a “dictator” from “day one” if he were to run for a second term. He is also being prosecuted for trying to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election. And Joe Biden, candidate for re-election in November, accused his predecessor of espousing “political violence”.
In a 2023 survey conducted by the Brookings Institutes and PRRI, 23% of Americans surveyed believed that “true American patriots might be forced to resort to violence to save (their) country.”
“Sabotage”
But for William Howell, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, while there is reason to worry about the rise in political violence, large-scale armed conflict is not on the agenda. .
Answers to vague questions in a survey do not necessarily reflect reality and how citizens might behave, he added.
The American political arena has rarely been so divided, but the supposed schism in society is “exaggerated,” says William Howell.
“I don’t think we are on the verge of a civil war,” he adds, citing instead “the erosion of state powers, the sabotage of administrations, and the disaffection of the general public” as reasons for this polarization. .
All this can be true, “without us starting to massacre ourselves” as between 1861 and 1865, during the Civil War.
Author Stephen Marche believes, on the contrary, that the United States represents “a textbook case of a country heading straight for civil war”, but not as in Civil War.
His book The Next Civil War uses political science models to advance five scenarios that could trigger full-scale armed conflict in the United States.
Among these scenarios: militias hostile to the state confront federal forces, a president is assassinated…
For some, political violence “becomes acceptable and in some sense, inevitable” because they “don’t think their government is legitimate,” says Stephen Marche.
“Fragmentary Chaos”
But it is unlikely that we will see a war between two distinct geographic areas, as in the Civil War between the North and the South, says the author.
The most likely? “Fragmentary chaos,” says Stephen Marche, similar to the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland at the end of the 20e century.
In Civil War, director Alex Garland knowingly omits the sources of the conflict or the ideology at work. For him the film must allow “a conversation” on the division of society and populism.
The action is also centered on the daily life that has become horrible for Americans.
“We don’t need to be explicit. We know exactly how this could happen,” Alex Garland said at the film’s premiere in Austin, Texas.
The “three-term president” of the film allows us to draw a parallel with the fear that many Americans have in the event of Donald Trump’s re-election.
They fear that the Republican billionaire will refuse to comply with the Constitution which limits the number of presidential terms to two and to leave power after four years.
A not so improbable scenario “if you take him at his word,” assures William Howell. “And I think we would be wrong” not to believe his words.