What kind of American are you?What kind of American are you? – Donald Trump, Civil War, and the Vicissitudes of Propaganda ArtWhat kind of American are you?

“What kind of American are you?” asks the militiaman of each journalist. He speaks calmly before nonchalantly killing one Asian-featured reporter, then asking again, and shooting another. Standing alongside an open-pit mass grave of civilians he’s recently murdered, this psychopath in fatigues, played by typecast villain Jesse Plemons of Breaking Bad fame, now demands a response from the other three traumatised journalists while his accomplice starts pouring lime over the many bodies.
It’s a Holocaust snapshot, but happening in Virginia, USA. Beyond appalling, this is one of many white-knuckle scenes that define the 2024 film Civil War – timed to hit the movie circuits just seven months before last year’s US presidential election. It is a vision of America’s imminent apocalypse. For context, we learn in the opening scene that the fictional president of this dystopian version of America is in his third term, constitutionally illegal, but nevertheless demanded by Donald Trump in past rallies, in the real world.
We also learn that he has gotten rid of the FBI, a science fiction fabrication that inadvertently foresaw Trump’s FBI pick Kash Patel, who has sworn to dismantle the FBI headquarters and in so doing, the Deep State. It is a film whose intent was meant to shock the US voter into action.
Civil War tells the story of four journalists and war photographers on a mission to capture images of what they sense are the last days of an authoritarian federal government, and to get what would be an exclusive final interview with the president, hopefully before the White House is overrun. They traverse dangerous embattled roads from New York to Washington D.C., experiencing the front lines of a modern-day incarnation of civil war in America. Anarchic, horrifying, gratuitous in its explicit violence.
The film is harrowing at times, yet irresistible to watch. It suffers, however, from a fundamental, inner textual conflict. It is quite clearly about a potential, extreme, outcome of allowing Trump back into the Oval Office, but it goes to great lengths to appear not overtly political. It is precisely in its covertness that it reveals itself for what it is – a piece of propaganda art.
In fact, shortly after the film was released, certain commentators criticised writer-director Alex Garland for not more overtly spelling out the liberal perspective of right-wing dangers – essentially, for not making an explicit anti-Trump film. They miss the point that propaganda works precisely by pretending to be something else, by appearing not to be propaganda at all. That is the art of propaganda.
And the fingerprints of propaganda are everywhere.
The bizarre ideological alignment between California and Texas, coalescing as the nobler rebel Western Forces, is one such clue. This is a shroud, a propaganda technique to distract. The creators picked two real-world ideologically misaligned states, that do not even border each other, deliberately to obscure from the viewer the film’s true intent.
Similarly, there’s a parody of the fascist face of the US right-wing in the features and persona of the killer militant played by Plemons, his red-tinted sunglasses a reference to the Proud Boys leader and the zany outfits of many of the January 6th insurrectionists. In contrast, a good-guy soldier trying to stifle a sniper holed up in a Southern colonial style mansion has a rainbow buzzcut, a culture cue for LGBTQ inclusivity.
We are compelled, as viewers, to follow the war through the lens of journalists, the implication being that our protagonists are objective. Problematically, then, they are all emblematically left-wing. The war-weary photojournalist, Lee, is famous for her shots of a supposed Antifa massacre; she curls her lips at a broadcast snippet of the president’s speech. Reuters writer Joel smokes marijuana and speaks with a marked Latino accent. The young Gen-Z wannabe, Jesse, conveys a lesbian attraction to Lee, playfully preferring to photograph her posing in a dress she picks out, while waving Joel away. And the wizened Black veteran reporter, Sammy, kindles the racial prejudice angle for audiences. Stopping in a town bizarrely unaffected by the war, he tells Lee to glance to the building roofs. Snipers are observing, alert. “It feels like everything I remembered,” he whispers to her, a reference to Jim Crow.
If the fingerprints of propaganda have left any residual uncertainty, they’re underscored for clarity at the end when the president is hauled out from hiding by Western Forces soldiers on a mission to find and kill. POTUS is narrow-eyed, dishevelled, pasty-skinned, and – yes – has bouffant hair.
If Civil War, in portraying an apocalyptic narrative that the left-wing in the US has become obsessed with, intended to influence the outcome of the election, then it vastly misread its audience, and the American public in general. If, on the other hand, it had no political intent, then it reads like a biased piece of apocalyptic dystopian art. Entertaining, obscenely violent, and divisive.
Reading a New York Times editorial published in December 2024, it was clear to me just how blurred the line between art and real life has become. The article began dramatically with black and white footage of an intercontinental ballistic missile soaring through the night sky before the title, “The President’s Arsenal”, appeared in large, looming text, to deliver the message that Trump could, like a bumbling child, send the world into a state of nuclear warfare with the press of a button.
Now, with just a few days to expire before the inauguration of Donald Trump, it is worth noting that if the Democrats wish in the future to govern, or at the very least to provide a sensible, authentic approach to achieving political balance, then they will have to dig deep, and lose their apocalyptic narrative once and for all.
By David Buckham
Buckham is founder and CEO of Johannesburg-based international management consultancy Monocle Solutions and author of “Orthogonal Thinking: My Own Search for Meaning in Mathematics, Literature & Life” (Exclusive Books, Amazon)