Snake Oil Cinema: Civil War and Eddington

A full-length review of Eddington by staff writer Cyd Okum can be found here.

Say you’re feeling really sick one day, so you visit the office of Dr. Alex Garland. Without much of an examination, he quickly diagnoses you with Civil War disease, and then proceeds to describe the long list of horrors you’re about to experience because of the disease. So, now that you’re totally freaked out, you ask, “Well, what can I do to stop those bad things from happening?” And he says, “I don’t know, because I can’t even tell you what causes Civil War disease.”  So you think, “Well, that wasn’t very helpful.” But you’re still feeling sick and now freaked out, so you decide to get a second opinion at the office of Dr. Ari Aster. He too diagnoses you with Civil War disease, but says it’s a particular form, called Eddington’s. He then proceeds to describe a long list of causes for Eddington’s. When he’s finally done with his list, you ask, “So, are there any treatments for it?” and he says, “No. Eddington’s is hopeless.” As a result, while these doctors had very different approaches to your disease, you walked out of both their offices not only feeling worse, but also feeling powerless to do anything about it. That is what it’s like if you watch Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024) and Ari Aster’s Eddington (2025) back-to-back. Both films address our current political climate; both leave you hopeless. And the one thing we all could probably use a little of in this political climate is some hope. 

I watched the premiere of Civil War, directed by Alex Garland, at SXSW in 2024. The film follows a group of war photographers and journalists as they travel from New York City to Washington, D.C., to cover the final battle for the U.S. capital in a civil war between the federal government and an alliance of rebellious states, called the Western Forces. Without much of a setup, the film throws you into the middle of the civil war, avoiding any exposition on the causes of the civil war, as the characters have more immediate concerns, only enigmatically referring once to the President’s “third term.” 

As the credits rolled, I sat in shock. It was immediately clear to me what Garland had done with this film: he had exposed viewers to the violence and horrors of a civil war, if one were to happen in the U.S., without providing them with any of the historical and political contexts that could lead to such horrors and violence. By titling a film “Civil War” during a period of heightened political polarization in the U.S., Garland guaranteed good box office returns (making his film A24’s second highest-grossing after Everything Everywhere All at Once). He failed from a storytelling perspective to create a narrative that could actually help prevent a civil war by identifying its causes, leaving viewers disillusioned with the violence and horrors of a civil war without the tools or hope for preventing one.  

Then, recently, I watched Eddington, directed by Ari Aster, and for very different reasons, had the same feeling after the film. Set in a small town in New Mexico in 2020, the film follows a long-simmering conflict between the local sheriff and the mayor as COVID lockdowns, pandemic masking, George Floyd protests, social media algorithms, data center development, election denialism, pedophile conspiracies, and antifa shock troops all come together to create a phantasmagoria of political polarization and violence. The film is told from the perspective of the sheriff, a stand-in for MAGA, who opposes the non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to prevent the spread of COVID-19, such as masking, social distancing, and lockdowns. At one point, the mayor confronts the sheriff, an asthmatic, who refuses to wear a mask while shopping at a grocery store. The sheriff mocks the mayor for claiming masks reduce transmission of the disease by saying COVID has not yet arrived in the town of Eddington, and then buys groceries for a customer kicked out of the store for not wearing a mask. Throughout the film, Aster gives credence to the sheriff’s views by having the audience develop empathy for the MAGA figure and his grievances, particularly those toward pandemic restrictions and George Floyd protests. Much like how the Sound of Music (1965) and Forrest Gump (1994) could be seen as historical rehabilitation films for Austrians (by extension Germans) after the war and Southern whites after the Civil Rights Era, respectively, Eddington could be seen as a MAGA historical rehabilitation film after the pandemic and the George Floyd protests. 

This perspective is clear, how, in contrast, Aster portrays the sheriff’s opponents, particularly the liberal mayor and young BLM activists. He portrays the liberal mayor as being corrupted by funds from a high-tech company, which plans to build a data center that will deplete the town’s water supply. Young activists are portrayed as being motivated by sex to join the movement, or so indoctrinated that they sound absurd.  At one point, one of the white activists unironically gives a speech in which, after saying he’s part of the system of white supremacy, he says, “I’m just another privileged white kid and my job is to sit down and listen, which is what I plan to do after making this speech, which I have no right to make!” More ominously, after the sheriff experiences a cumulative series of humiliations justifying his grievances, he turns to killing those who humiliated him, including the mayor. But this turn from victim to villain is brief, as Aster quickly finds a way to turn the murderous sheriff into the victim again, this time by the deus ex machina of “Antifa.” Yes, Antifa. As if the script was written by Stephen Miller, Aster portrays Antifa as a well-funded, heavily-armed, and well-organized militia — flown into Eddington on a private jet, no less — with a Terminator-like mission to kill cops, particularly the sheriff.

As a result, the film recasts MAGA movement as victims and the real threat coming from liberal mayors, young activists, and antifa militias rather than the oligarch-backed authoritarianism we face today. In the process, Aster ridicules and delegitimizes protest movements just at a moment when we need to mobilize movements to defend democratic institutions against authoritarianism. But, in Aster’s hall of social media mirrors, liberals are corrupt, activists are indoctrinated, and antifa is extremely violent — and we’re all powerless to defend our failing institutions. 

Civil War and Eddington arrive at a moment when visual storytelling needs to be more than entertainment. In an era of democratic fragility, rising authoritarianism, and weaponized social media, the stories we tell must rise to meet this crisis. And, while both films gesture toward a social and political critique, neither offers such a payoff with a path out of the crisis. Garland’s Civil War strips away historical causality to present political violence as inevitable. Aster’s Eddington gives credence to MAGA authoritarianism by legitimizing its grievances and portraying it as a victim. Both films descend into ambiguity, violence, and cynicism, leaving viewers disoriented and disillusioned, while obscuring the asymmetries of power and the real-world threat of authoritarianism.

Since Hollywood’s first feature-length film, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in 1915, we’ve understood the real-world consequences and power of filmmaking. Griffith’s film created a white supremacist narrative on the history of the Reconstruction era that grotesquely dehumanized African Americans, and fueled the rise of a second Ku Klux Klan (KKK) The fact that, within months of the film’s release, white supremacists inspired by his film refounded the KKK clearly demonstrates the power of filmmaking to promote narratives with real-world effects, including lynchings and “race riots” targeting African Americans. While not having the scale of influence in our current fragmented media ecosystem, the films Civil War and Eddington do not use the power of filmmaking to meet our political moment. At a time when we need clarity, they offer ambiguity. When we need to mobilize, they say we’re powerless. When we need hope, they give us despair. By not offering hope for real change, Dr. Garland and Dr. Aster are exposed as smooth-filmmaking snake-oil salesmen, offering elixirs of entertainment without cures for what ails us. 

Ellison Martin (CC’29) is a filmmaker from Texas and current Columbia University student double-majoring in Film & Media Studies and American Studies. Her documentary Don’t Mess with Texas: An Abortion Story won the Grand Prize at the Tribeca Festival in the RFK Human Rights “Speak Truth to Power” competition and the UIL “Nobelity Social Impact Award.” With over 20 short films and training in directing, cinematography, and screenwriting at UCLA and Yale, Martin’s work blends craft with activism, confronting themes of justice, gender, and identity. Rooted in her background as a youth organizer, she continues to develop new narrative shorts at Columbia that harness cinema as a catalyst for empathy and social change.

Instagram: @ellison.film