The new film, Civil War is not light viewing, but it’s a film every American (and all Americans are the right “kind of American”) should see — in the same way most Americans watched the TV film The Day After in 1983, which changed attitudes about nuclear brinkmanship.
Civil War portrays a near-future apocalyptic meltdown of American democracy and the inevitable, violent, secessionist nightmare that ensues. But it’s not red states vs. blue states as you might expect. It’s less predictable, less specific about the causes, although there are clues and you can fill in the blanks for yourself.
The ending is powerful and disturbing — and strangely moving. I won’t spoil it, but I will say that the writer/director (Alex Garland, from Great Britain) offers it as a cautionary warning, “This is what your current state of disunion leads to,” it seems to say. “Is this really what you want?” Every kind of American would do well to heed and answer that question.
I sure hope this isn’t what we choose. But the state of the world and the nation are undeniably troubling at the moment. What with the Murderous Mess in the Mideast, the Tribulations and Trials of Trump, the Cauldron of Chaos on Campuses, and Supreme Court Subversives pretzel-bending principle to immunize their patron against standing trial for sedition before the next election — I needed an antidote to the doom and gloom.
Reading Brian Doyle provided it.
Doyle, who died way too young in 2017, saw hints of the divine everywhere, mostly in the smallness of the everyday, even, maybe especially, in the painfulness of life. He made redemption sound plausible and accessible. His humanity and humor shine through everything he wrote.
And he wrote with a furious purpose, or a purposeful fury, or both. He wrote as if he could hear the music that swirls all around us, every day, everywhere, which the rest of us can’t tune into most of the time, surrounded as we are by the din of cacophonous downerism that afflicts us 24/7.
Reading Brian Doyle is a tonic. It’s like reading (as the title of his posthumous collection of essays puts it) “one long river of song.”
Here’s a sample, speaking of campuses. After the death of his older brother Kevin, he took a trip back to their mutual alma mater, Notre Dame, to revisit his brother’s dorm rooms, looking for traces of his life there in a piece titled, “The country of who he used to be”:
“I grope after something else about those rooms, about my brother’s life in those rooms, about the 700 days and nights that he lived there, some 50 feet in the air above the sandy soil of northern Indiana.”
What follows is one long river of a sentence: “The silent dawns, when he awoke in the top bunk, above a snoring roommate, and for a moment was back in his childhood bed, in the dapple of tall sweetgum trees outside his window, his mother’s silvery laugh in the kitchen as faint as yesterday’s hymn; the long winter nights, as he sat at his ancient desk, staring at the runes cut by a dozen previous denizens; the thump of basketballs and ricochet of footballs in the hallway, and the deep barking laughs of the burly neighbors who hammer and fling them; the autumnal smell of sawn wood as students edit their rooms, and the vernal smells of mothers in the hall, reclaiming their sons for the summer; the stammer of greetings to a friend’s girlfriend, the cheerful roars at a friend’s kid brother visiting in awe; the shouldery tumult and reek and jest of roommates, and the snarl of shoes and jackets by the door; the annual drawing of straws or cutting of cards for who gets which room; the wry notes left for each other, the casual generosity, the thicket of toothbrushes, the dank of towels and socks, the scrawl of numbers and names written on the yellow wall by the phone against all rules and regulations; and the way those names and numbers will be painted out, at the last moment, with paint of a wholly different color than the paint originally applied by the university when Indiana was young and dinosaurs strolled the earth.”
Life being reclaimed from death.
He concludes with this:
“We thrash after ways to say what we know to be true, that the breath and laughter and tears and furies and despairs and thrills and epiphanies of long children on a campus, season the very air, coat the walls, soak into the soil just as dying birds and leaves do, in ways we can never quite measure or articulate; so that while my brother’s ashes now rest in another soil, something of him, something of who he was, something of who he became, swirls still in the rooms where he lived for three years when he was young.”
Death in life leads to life in death if you look hard enough. A metaphorical resurrection. So when you feel the world is gloomier than you can bear, look for an antidote. Look for the life in it. Look harder. Find, as Brian Doyle did, “the thorny grace of it.”
Keep your humanity alive and we will keep our country alive.
