GUT PUNCH TO THE AMERICAN PSYCHE
Civil War, Independence Day and Hollywood's tradition of blowing up D.C. send a powerful message
Editor's note: This contains spoilers for the movie Civil War.
The Western Forces descend on Washington. Tanks and soldiers flood the District, helicopters loom above. The Lincoln Memorial, now a garrison, is destroyed by rocket fire. The invading army's final target? The Oval Office, where an authoritarian president has lost control of everything. Journalists wade through the battlefield so the world can see, with horror and relief, how the United States has fallen.
That is how writer and director Alex Garland films the climax of his dystopian thriller Civil War. In it, he envisions a fractured nation: Texas and California have seceded and the Mid-atlantic is a giant war zone. Critics have split over the movie's scope and intentions, and whether Garland is invoking real-world political tensions while keeping the particulars blurry.
Put me in the pro camp: A meditation on conflict's tendency to exhilarate, horrify and compromise, Civil War teems with terror and suspense. As the protagonists travel circuitously from New York to D.C., they strain to remain impartial as they encounter unimaginable scenes on American soil: armed skirmishes, a mass grave. And then, finally, the destruction of a whole city.
The decimation of Washington, D.C., in Civil War hits you in the gut, which is kind of weird. Filmmakers love to destroy Washington. We see them do it — for the wrong reasons — all the time. A city of symbols has something important going for it: It's also a city of shorthands. Pulverizing Washington — sacking it, wrecking it, roughing it up a bit — tells audiences that they've just witnessed an unfathomable loss, a blow to the American spirit. But the most harrowing scenes of D.C. getting ethered — the ones that connect on an emotional level, like in Civil War — are from films that want to do more than use the monuments for pyrotechnics practice. Boots on the ground, the suggestion of a real city, are the only way to create intimacy and human stakes.
The most famous offender: Independence Day, the popular alien invasion film from 1996, in which a flying saucer fires a death ray directly onto the White House. Los Angeles and Manhattan get zapped too — but have some actual humans in the streets. In D.C., any catastrophic loss of life is incidental; the president and his entourage are whisked away from the White House just in time. No thought for those living nearby, no quantifiable loss of life, not even a tourist on Pennsylvania Avenue. Director Roland Emmerich might as well have blown up a dollhouse. In fact, that's what he did.
That exploding White House is an impressive feat of practical effects, a shot that intrigued audiences from the movie's first trailer. But the shallow nature of Independence Day can be felt in how often the sequence has been remixed. The shot is a punchline in an Austin Powers movie. If you go to the Alamo Drafthouse movie theatre in D.C., there's a statue of Bill Pullman as the president he played in the film. It's trivial. You cannot fathom Civil War lingering in the popular imagination as kitsch, because Garland wants to shake his audience, not have D.C.'S destruction amount to little more than movie magic.
Other similarly cavalier examples abound. Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! (1996) includes a cheeky sequence in which aliens use death rays and UFOS to juggle the Washington Monument until it can fall on a Boy Scout troop. For these cartoonishly evil Martians, that comes with a pay bump, as undoubtedly does dropping a chandelier on the first lady. Like Emmerich, Burton was borrowing Washington's symbols for his own purposes — in his case, really handing it to elites — but at least his over-the-top film doesn't register as glib.
More affecting is the mediocre sci-fi thriller The Invasion (2007), which is restrained in its assault on the District. But it is a frightening depiction of the city losing its grip, because it presents a ground-eye view of aliens taking control. I barely remember the film, but I have not shaken the image of people flinging themselves off the roof of Union Station.
How about superhero movies? Captain America: The Winter Soldier includes a giant hovercraft crashing into the Potomac River (the filmmakers had to digitally widen the waterway for their climactic shot). X-men: Days of Future Past has a scene where the mutant Magneto levitates RFK Stadium from the banks of the Anacostia, then drops it onto the White House South Lawn. Like Independence Day, these sequences are technically impressive, but they need a human touch. Before Magneto lifts the arena, he at least has an exchange with a worker — a human — who can only stand by and watch, powerless.
Blockbuster filmmakers like Emmerich aren't seeking out character beats when they demolish the District and that's not why we see his movies — or the decades of chase movies, fight movies, disaster movies and monster movies that ignore the human toll of the carnage they depict — anyway. These scenes are often made with skill and craft, but unless there is a sense of humanity or loss, they can't truly abhor or thrill. We can see an empty, technically proficient exercise when superstorms wreck D.C. in The Day After Tomorrow, or Cobra tanks roll toward the Capitol in GI: Joe: Retaliation. Almost all these scenes offer a distant view of the Capitol, rather than the street-level panic they would actually inspire. They don't hit. The only drawback to finding some humanity in the District would be that directors might become less eager to annihilate it.
Civil War does similarly right by this town. Before the Western Forces and the combat journalists can enter the White House, they have to make it past soldiers guarding the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Garland imagines the EEOB protected by large concrete walls designed to repel on-theground troops — but it's honestly not that much more intense than the security theatre that visitors encounter in real life when they visit the building for a work event.
A city of symbols, sure, but one that can hold multiple meanings. A city you hate to see go boom.