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Notes -
It’s interesting, this is similar to my impression of the 2024 film Civil War. A lot of ink was spilled speculating about the degree to which it was an anti-Trump or anti-right-wing film, and criticizing the implausibility of the different coalitions in the civil war. (“Why are Texas and California allied? Don’t these dummies know that California and Texas are politically opposed to each other?”) When to me the film clearly seemed to want to capture the sense of fish-out-of-water befuddlement that journalists experience covering foreign war zones.
Some American journalist covering a civil war in some random African country is sure to have the same sense of “What the fuck is even happening here? Why is the Kibunda tribe allied with the Yojinga tribe, when all my research says these two groups have longstanding enmity toward each other? Why do any of these groups care about these obscure disputes, and why are they willing to kill each other (and innocents) and wreck their countries over something that, to an outsider, seems petty and incomprehensible?” I think the screenwriter wanted to get Americans to consider that their own country’s internal politics aren’t immune to being seen in this same way. To put it in terms Americans can relate to. Just like with that movie though, it sounds like Far Cry 5 hit a little too close to home and people weren’t able to view if with any sort of distance or detachment from current hot-button issues.
My impression on Civil War was that the director understood, quite wisely, that most people wanted a movie that flattered their partisan identity, where what he wanted to show was what an actual civil war would mean for America on a concrete, day-to-day level. He makes the factions a nonsense hodgepodge because he doesn't want people to frame every single thing he depicts as "their wretched villainy/our righteous triumph." By invalidating everything we know or suspect about America's actual geographical fault-lines, he throws people into a limbo where, while groping around for some sense of what's going on, they might actually view the events he depicts with something approaching objectivity.
If that was the plan, though, it didn't seem to work for most people I've seem commentating, who were mostly upset that they didn't get the partisan propaganda they were looking for.
Also, the conventional wisdom about American geographic fault lines is wrong- ideological conflict would be a window dressing for realpolitik interests in an actual federal state failure condition. There’s some baked i with the inter mountain west getting oppressed by the coast, but no inherent reason that the heartland would side with one or the other.
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