THE SECOND CIVIL WAR*

Where are the men in war

Joe Dante says that he wanted to start the movie with the bomb exploding in Pakistan, but after a couple of minutes walking along with Dan Hedaya in News Net network's communication center, it becomes clear that Dante, in any event, isn’t going to be bluffing his way through. At this point, it's still no time to call a spade a spade, but before the final showdown it's time for everyone to face his own acts as leading to irreversible consequences. If the war actually results from James Coburn - as an "information facilitator" - confusing two simple words, the enormity of the situation is absurd but tragically logical, serving to point up the very substance of each and every sequence: nothing is fortuitous, even when insignificant. Obviously, Joe Dante has made one of the sharpest political pieces to come out of Hollywood in the past two decades, but if The Second Civil War is politics and nothing else, that's not simply because it deals with highly controversial issues of its time with all cards on the table, but more fundamentally because it deals with politics as it is, a series of consequences, from deliberate actions or absences of choice. The movie is about that, and nothing else.

Joe Dante was born a satirist, but is still hopelessly a humanist. It's not rare to see Frank Capra trump Frank Tashlin, for better or worse. If the tone is acerbic, the humor is generous. It's a kind of miracle to see how the cartoonish figure of Dan Hedaya - a self-satisfied bastard born to belch the absurd and disorderly orders of a puppet demiurge - progressively vanishes, through an accumulation of tiny details offering small moments of incongruous lucidity, if not tenderness, leaving only the terror and the doubt. Beau Bridges’ performance is no less remarkable, as the most sympathetic villain ever (as long as you "don't take it personally"), albeit slightly over the edge at times, as in the very capraesque sequence that puts him on the top of the world when he weeps for his life on the roof of the governor's mansion. On the downside, I can only regret the introduction of the character played by James Earl Jones, who seems to distort the whole spirit of the film, the old-timer carrying his big heart in his little bag as the voice of conscience, which occasionally sounds somewhat reactionary.

But this fragile (dis)equilibrium is the inevitable - and precious - corollary of a rare approach where television screens out unanimism. When the film device is introduced as manipulated by NN network's control screens, it soon appears that the men of influence are hardly running after the inevitable, and the screens' waltz offers a choral gesture where everyone has his part, barely able to communicate with each other except through interposed cameras (the scene where Elizabeth Peña / Christina translates the speech of the mayor of Los Angeles is quite symptomatic of such a universe, with its multiple levels of understanding, and eventually none except hers). It should be noted that, through wide and precise movements, Joe Dante demonstrates a rare virtuosity in handling such an abundant cast, especially considering the kind of budget he was dealing with. He uses all available means, drawing on collective imagination as well as on his own cinephilic paradise. Never sly, far from any mannerism, he is not engaged in a vain demolition session; if, here and there, Dante gladly scratches some of his figures, he always catches them back in a next scene, through a melting shot that spares none, but condemns none (with the notable exception of Phil Hartman as The President).

It's surprising to see how rare men in war are in Dante’s so-called war trilogy. Their absence in the apocalyptic Matinee is as terrifying as the surrounding menace. The small soldiers never try to openly divert us from the innocence - or the virtue - of their bloodless plastic legs. In The Second Civil War, the entrance of old-timers Maj. Gen. Charles Buford and Col. McNally offers inglorious images that promise the worst farce ever. But the farce doesn’t last: suddenly - although not unexpectedly - the violence of the combat breaks into the screen / the battlefield. Dante captures these moments in their whole, and irreducible, incongruity. A few fleeting shots tremble from horror and uneasiness. Unease as in the unique and remarkable scene where Joanna Cassidy desperately tries to make her fellow newscaster shut up by banging his head on the table; the instant is outrageously absurd, but the comic reflex is paralyzed, the laugh held back by embarrassment. The Second Civil War is ultimately another innervoyage by Joe Dante into this territory where the only enemy comes from the inside, where all accumulated images can only converge towards the black hole of the television screen when it shuts down, where any representation is impossible, where men in war are simply men where they are.

*Thanks to Bill Krohn for kindly reviewing my English

Maxime Renaudin

December 2011