Civil War: Field Notes on the Pedagogy of Succession
Under the Ice,
The future stirred.
- Louise Glück, Averno
Now writing in the dwindling light of election coverage, and the gray-fingered dawn of the second Trump administration, Alex Garland’s film Civil War (A24) is still playing in the borderlands of my consciousness alongside a future that did not come to pass.
In the months immediately after the film debuted in theaters, I stumbled around in a daze and felt mystified by the kind of middling political attention it garnered. Yes, somehow a film so bold to be named after pre-election fears and phantasies received mostly surface level reviews, most of which missed the point of how such a Civil War might begin in the first place.
The film follows a group of war journalists covering a brutal Civil War on American soil in the not-so-distant future. Kirsten Dunst plays a battered and famous war photographer alongside Wagner Moura as a journalist, her partner-in-crime. Mid-career, approaching middle age, and in the midst of a war, the team is joined by an aging reporter decades their senior, and a rookie hop on twenty years younger. This little crew comes together to travel from New York to DC with hopes of interviewing the current three-term president, played by a cheeky and disturbed Nick Offerman.
In Garland’s construction of the future, we see the unlikely coalition between Texas, California and something called “The Florida Alliance.” His camera brings us close to streaming waves of sun on waving blades of grass, and the multicolored, nail-polished fingers of a soldier gripping a sniper rifle. Such unlikely alliances between what viewers know as politically disparate states paired with dueling cultural markers enthralled audiences and critics. Woke rainbow nails on an AR-15? California and Texas finally finding common ground? Is this how it will all play out?
As seductively juxtaposed as these choices are, I think the reviewers and critics have let them eclipse Garland’s larger narrative. This film is not just a creative director hypothesizing what a brutal war would look like in this country, though the director and his team do nothing short of magic to create that setting. Many viewers reported feeling nauseated by the violence of the film, its fast-paced gore and the 1.85:1 aspect ratio, which makes the shots feel taller—and more real—than most. This is the ratio often used by documentarians. Still, this film is not just a cathartic and controversial opportunity for a live theater audience to watch the wreckage of the U.S. capitol in a post-January 6th era (though I did marvel at my own confused enjoyment of it). I’d also be willing to wager the film is not primarily about reckoning with the objectivity of the media or the brutality of violence caused by misguided allyship and othering.
No, I felt wrecked after seeing Civil War because I felt my own mortality heavy in my mouth. This was a film about succession. A film about aging, and I felt my age. I felt my age in my own womanhood. I felt the weight of being a mentor myself. And I wanted to dry heave it away.
Like many of Garland’s other films, Annihilation, Men, and Ex-Machina, Civil War revolves around the inner struggle of a woman—or women. Their bodies and minds hold the tension and the thrust of the narrative. Generally, Garland’s women do not exist primarily to be sexualized. Generally, these women are on a mission.
Amidst the parable—or prophecy—of the film’s titular conflict, we get a more nuanced tension within Dunst herself. As battle rages, Dunst contends with her own reluctance to take on Spaeny, the new rookie reporter. It’s a safety risk for the team to have such an inexperienced person along for their harrowing ride. Multiple times, this proves to be true, but Dunst’s resistance is deeper as we watch her reckon with the necessary costs and existential dread of mentorship in the problematic work you love. Dunst and Spaeny are the ones who remind us just how painful succession really is.
In a moment where the team enters a town seemingly untouched by the war (yet inexplicably guarded by rooftop snipers), they play around in hats and clothes in a small boutique, the kind with novelty magnets and accessories just-aged-out of being trendy. You know, the kind you’ve browsed in small American towns without ever buying anything.
Dunst tries on a sundress, not a suggestive one, just a clean and seemingly decent dress, a stark contrast from the dirty, sweaty t-shirts, reporters' jeans and press vests she’s been wearing. It’s a rare moment for Garland, wherein he reminds the audience not only of Dunst’s femininity, but also of her youth. The younger Spaeny idles nearby. Dunst resists the dress at first, and Spaeny pokes at her: “What, are you so war-torn you can’t try on a dress?”
There’s a quiet appreciation about what beauty was, and still is, present in this moment. It’s what Spaeny is perceiving in Dunst. A slight whiff of sapphic adoration sneaks in the corners of the frame as Spaeny asks to take Dunst’s photo, but it dissipates quickly as Spaeny and Dunst resume their roles as student and teacher. Dunst sighs. She seems to suggest Spaeny is taking too long.
“You told me not to rush,” Spaeny says to an impatient Dunst.
“But there’s a sweet spot, and you’re missing it,” Dunst replies, the exasperated teacher.
“I don’t want to miss your sweet spot,” Spaeny says. It’s playful.
Dunst smiles, in spite of herself, and Spaeny clicks.
—
In an interview in Marie Claire following the film's debut, Dunst confessed that before being offered the Civil War script, she had been continually only offered “sad mom parts.” After playing a mom in Power of the Dog, she felt like her fate had been written. “There’s definitely less good roles for women my age,” she told the reporter.
Reader, Dunst is 42.
As Dunst tried on the dress and Spaeny photographed her, my mind went back to the first times I saw Dunst in Bring it On (1999), Spiderman (2002), and Marie Antoinette (2006). I grew up watching Dunst, my own budding understanding of beauty, sexuality, and delicate power developed with and by narratives focused on her normative 90s blonde girl appeal. Her sharp blue-eyed gaze and just-round-enough face was the smooth and impossible Barbie I longed to be in my own life. In my next decade, Dunst helped define the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” of the 2000’s with Elizabethtown (2005).
In 2024, I saw her reflection change. Wrinkles. Exhaustion etched in her slight crow’s feet. Rumpled clothes and the slow movement, not of a cheerleader, but of someone who knows her body, someone with maybe a little lower back pain. The scene in the shop reminds us Dunst is pretty. But when foiled by Spaeny, we remember she once was prettier. I wanted to cry as I watched them.
I am in my 30’s. And that is quite young, I know. At least, I thought so. But I am always surrounded by the younger. I’m a faculty member of an intensive Master’s program in education that prepares young people to be public school teachers. My job mostly consists of working with rookies — an entire team of the inexperienced. Most of them are between 21 and 26, the majority just out of college, never having joined a professional workforce. It's a risk. And in their early days, necessarily and understandably, they fail.
They have never heard the word “slacks” to describe work pants, which I encourage them to buy. Some of their shirts show midriff on their first day of class. Most of my students are women. Most of them, without this hyperbolic professional costume, due to their gender and the cultural disregard for teaching as a profession, stand to not be taken very seriously.
But I do take them seriously. And most days, I wish their costuming mattered less. This particular lesson is a rough moment in our work, and I struggle to navigate the sharp judgment of the professional world as I know it to be, and the world I wish it were for them. Most of my year with them dances between this split reality. Together, we cultivate their pedagogical persona, the person they want to be in the classroom, and meld it with who their students need them to be. And eventually, if I do my job right as a teacher of the teachers, they embody the public school teacher better than I did, with the creativity and insight that only the new can bring.
—
I listened to a podcast that invited Garland as a guest to discuss Civil War and his career. Garland wrote and directed Civil War, but he has also written scripts that he has not directed. The hosts asked if there were scenes from other scripts of his that Garland wished he had directed himself instead of giving them up to a younger director. Garland refused the premise of the question. Instead, he talked about a scene where a younger director shot something better than he could have imagined.
In the same interview, the host asked Garland what he thought about the rumors of his retirement and the incredibly kind things people were saying to beg him to “stay.” In response, Garland brought up the famed scene from Tom Sawyer wherein Tom and Huck are spying on Tom’s erroneous funeral from the rafters. He acknowledged the moment of hearing one’s own eulogy as an impossible phantasy. And, of course, the desire remains. One might think it narcissistic, but there’s something self-ablating and deliciously free about the enjoyment of hearing posthumous praise. Once a member of the dead, one cannot be accused of egoism, of seeking out the praise we all desire. And, one can witness their own dynasty. The true phantasy of attending our own funerals is the phantasy of never dying power. A false hope that we will live forever. Garland wants us to imagine something else. He teaches us that it’s okay, even vital, to allow the young to take our places.
It is profoundly difficult to find mentors in this world. It is even more difficult to find a mentor who asks for nothing and looks for nothing in return other than their mentee’s flourishing: a mentor who genuinely rejoices in your successes, a mentor who at times has worked doubly hard, or gone to great lengths to make the road ahead easier for you, a mentor who does not believe in pain for pain’s sake, or that, because they suffered, you must too. The hand they hold out to you comes without conditions. They make space for you, slide their own chair to the side as you pull yours up to the table where they now eat less comfortably themselves.
But just how uncomfortable should mentors be? This is the question I gnaw on.
Much of my work with education students is teaching what it is to be a mentor for people younger than them. And, because women still pursue teaching in greater numbers than men, much of my work is attempting to model positive mentorship for women younger than me.
In the first semester of their graduate program, my students help teach the local city’s summer school and take their first load of graduate courses. They report to the university campus after the summer school day ends at 1pm, and their classes run into the evening. Beyond the adjustment to growing a sense of new self, the schedule alone threatens to tip them over every afternoon by three.
Two summers ago, one student, T, arrived in class, and I saw she was on her way down. Albeit on time, she explained her feet had swollen and blistered from new shoes she should not have worn without breaking them in first. We were about two weeks in, and T had heard my speech about professional dress and showing students, yes, even summer school students coming to school in the humid days of July, that you take yourself—and them—seriously. Being young myself, I did and still do the same. I wear heels. I wear the slacks. Lipstick. I model how formal and serious I take the profession of training them to do theirs. This is the costume I wear to communicate my confidence in them. And here was T, her own costume fraying, feet bare in class and in pain.
I felt responsible for her risky footwear decision. Always bring commuting shoes. Had I not taught them that? Had I “leaned in” too hard? Maybe they never saw the dusty rubber flip-flops in my NewYorker tote bag, which I’d learned to carry the hard way—too many blisters and one barefoot walk back from campus during my own Master’s year training to be a teacher.
Totally demoralized from a tough day and at capacity, T said aloud she had no idea how she would walk home. I saw tears brimming. What size are you? I asked before thinking it through. Instinctively, she replied. One size larger than me. I grabbed my tote bag with my rubber sandals, acknowledged how weird it might be, and said she could borrow them. She accepted quickly. I had known her for two weeks.
I remember putting my feet up that day after shuffling home on the uneven brick sidewalks in my own kitten heels, trying to avoid rolling my weak ankles. I didn’t have far to go, but I was too old to be seen barefoot, and still too young in my new faculty job not to care. I had good calluses on my cramped pinky toes. I could handle it, so I thought. And this wasn’t really about the shoes. In the moment, I realized I could teach T something else, something about mentorship, but I wasn’t sure what. Two years later, T’s class come and gone. In the midst of teaching another cohort, I still puzzle over if this somewhat made-for-TV teacher martyrdom was the right lesson to deliver about how to be a mentor. If it was, I taught it disingenuously. I know now what I couldn’t voice then: teaching true mentorship means being honest about the pain that comes with it. If you give your shoes away, don’t hide your blisters the next day.
—
Now for the movie spoilers.
In the penultimate scene of Civil War, the team has made it to the White House, or what’s left of it. Dunst is tired and clearly no longer feeling the thrill of capturing the combat with her camera. She’s wincing, the gleeful smiles and wild looks exchanged between her and her male counterpart, Moura, are gone. It’s the young Spaeny who looks like she’s lit from the inside. She and Moura mirror each other’s expressions, unspoken hell yeah’s, as they stick close to the action, the new pair wear matching mad hatter grins.
In these final scenes, the gunfire sounds so close and constant, we are nearer to the violence than we’ve ever been. Amidst this barrage, Garland shows us the still frames shot from Dunst and Spaeny’s dueling cameras, so the audience can judge mentor against mentee. He has done this throughout the film, but this feature takes on new meaning now. Spaeny’s shots are riskier, wilder, yes, maybe better. Shortly after following bullets exchanged between forces outside the Oval Office, Spaeny steps out to take a photo of the opposing and oncoming gunfire. She stays a second too long. Gunfire continues, but we no longer hear it. Dunst instinctually runs out to pull Spaeny back, and of course, Dunst absorbs the bullets. A moment long foreshadowed, Dunst falls to the ground in a series of still frames with only the noise of a camera clicking to accompany her, captured from underneath by the Spaeny she saved.
Cutting the sound of the camera clicking and giving the audience a silent four seconds, Garland narrows our gaze to see Spaeny slowly sit up. If you find yourself wondering what it might feel like to watch the mentee realize her own role in her mentor’s death, and see the empty space she must fill, you might watch this scene alone.
Once on her feet, Spaeny walks slowly into the light to follow the action.
Appearing in the Oval Office door frame, with shaky but deliberate steps, Spaeny clicks. And as she lowers her camera, she reveals a new face. No longer wide-eyed and unsure, her look is stern, objective, and dark, not unlike Dunst’s steely expression throughout the film.
Spaeny takes what we might assume as the final photo of the film, soldiers and Moura standing over the assassinated president with their guns, but another slowly develops behind the credits, a picture also ostensibly taken by Spaeny, of the soldiers’ big grins and peace signs in a macabre picture with the corpse, like teenage hunters out in deer season.
—
Mentorship is always a risk. Dunst protested when the senior reporter, played by Stephen McKinley Henderson and who once seemed to mentor Dunst, joined the team. He dies, too, earlier in the film after saving her, Moura, and Spaeny in a scene so graphically haunting and prescient, I understand how it has overshadowed the rest of the film for many viewers.
As I watched the first presidential debate, I thought about the two old men in front of the country. Regardless of policy positions, they were both older men who refused to relinquish power—two men who refused to take their hands away from the warmth of control. This was, perhaps, the most striking resemblance the movie Civil War bears to our country in its present moment: two men in power refusing to abdicate, even if it risks human suffering.
Stories teach, whether we want them to or not. So, what does Garland want us to learn? Many have guessed it’s something to the effect of a brutal warning, a prophecy of conflict on our own shores. Sure, but what’s the lesson we must learn to avoid the carnage?
Garland shows us what happens when the mentors—the leaders, the old guard—refuse to relinquish control. We want the film’s president to die. It’s harder to see Henderson and Dunst fall, not just because their deaths are gruesome, but because Garland shows us that mentors, like leaders, should be more comfortable, even uncomfortably so, with the inevitability of their own deaths.
I think the civil war that Garland wants us to see more clearly is already happening on U.S. soil—and other fronts too. It is the war between the mentor and mentee, the old and the young. It is the war within ourselves—between that youthful version of self we cling to with white knuckles, and the self that’s springing up from the chasm between my eyebrows, which deepens in the mirror every day. It’s the bouncy skin of my 20’s versus the new dryer skin of my 30’s. It’s the fresh takes I had as a rookie jockeying with the ways I now know better. It’s me versus me. It’s a nasty war and I don’t know who I’m rooting for anymore.
I don’t think people missed Garland’s point because it’s a bad lesson. They missed it because it’s a hard one to stomach, one some never learn. This lesson is also the inverse of what we understand the function of education to be: work we do for the young.
Philosopher Hannah Arendt’s theory of education is, in fact, based in natality. In other words, education exists to reckon with the constant onslaught of new beings born into our world. One might think this implies and includes a reckoning with our own eventual absence, but that’s what our leaders and mentors continue to avoid.
What if, instead, we understood education and mentorship not to be based in natality, but in mortality? What if our role as mentors, educators, and leaders is to train, quite literally, the people who will replace us? The people who will snap our picture as we fall and then move forward, quicker, and yes, better without us? How might our world change if we grounded ourselves in that unflinching and very real inevitability? How might it change us? How might it break us? And why was this lesson so hard for reviewers to come by?
I should have understood this more, and earlier, having thought about the relationship to death and teaching for over three years as I completed my doctoral research. Or longer than that, if you count the collective moments in my nightmares during the years I was a public school teacher, those nights when I plotted my middle schoolers’ escape from a school-shooter. If you’re wondering how I even feel justified speaking about teachers and the phantasy of civil war in the same essay, then perhaps you aren’t in the U.S., where bullets and artillery have become roommates with phonics and the SAT. All controversial and enduring parts of the American landscape of schools.
I started that project researching death and teaching after watching a group of student teachers, who had just experienced a lock-down at school, ask their professor if they were expected to die for their students in the event of a shooting. It’s a sick trolley problem that needs no conjuring from the philosopher’s imagination. They were being trained afterall, so what was the training? What was the “best practice”?
Once, beginning my own training in an experiential field known as Group Relations, a more experienced person in the work told me he needed something before working even proximal to me. He needed me to acknowledge my own desire to kill him. Even though I knew he meant a metaphorical death, I remember trying to deny it.
Within every ambitious and doting young mentee, there lies a certain amount of bloodlust, he told me. He asked me to be aware of it, or he couldn’t work with me. Unimpressed with youth, he had plucked my veneers right from my mouth to show me my own little vampire teeth. After fighting back his words in my head with the names of dead mentors whose emails I yearned to return to my inbox, or voices I longed to hear again, I began to learn to accept the implications of my own ambition, that same lesson inscribed on Spaeny’s face after Dunst fell.
There is a lack of honesty in our public sphere of politics, our work, and maybe even our families, when it comes to transitions. The necessary bloodshed of succession is obscured, relegated to a conversation left for the death bed or exit interview, a eulogy only delivered in front of the retirement cake.
Right now, the legend being told around the fire is that Nancy Pelosi was the truth-teller who urged Biden to stand down. That she, like the best of Hollywood’s mafiosos, orchestrated the final push. Nancy, a California native, knew what most women over the age of 31 do, while it seemed one of her oldest friends did not: they want the old people out. To be painfully precise, they want the old women dead. She knew this particular species of hostility with a kind of intimacy that only comes from defying gravity as an older woman in the public eye. This beast ever-stalks her. And she knows how it moves.
—
Had Biden accepted this bit of botoxed wisdom earlier, then perhaps Harris, or someone else even new-er, unforeseen by the eyes of the elder leaders and kept off-screen, could have had the space they needed to take the crown. Trump, though not much younger than Biden, and proof of the imagination of Americans, got the “new” or “newer” edit in their original televised match-up. He spoke forcefully, more quickly. He appeared lively. He and the fresh-faced coo-coo for MAGA-puffs Vance are the “different” that disgruntled people, more than half, have chosen. It’s a cruel edit for Harris, condemned to be an unjust antique of the feeble Biden administration. But from hindsight’s vantage, Republicans played a stronger hand.
There is a question burgeoning underneath the January ice of inauguration and a new presidential term: what do we, the older, owe the young? What do we, the younger, owe the old, especially if we are going to ask them to lose themselves for us to gain something more?
When students asks me if they should be ready to die for their students, the words still crumble out of my mouth. I squirm under the weight of the impossible task of preparing for that nightmare in their future classrooms, and providing an answer that is just as much about what I, also the teacher, owe my students. I know we are speaking about both kinds of death: the real and the symbolic.
I look at my hands, more wrinkled than I’ve ever known them, and better than they’ve ever been at my work than before, and I tell my students what I know to be true:
No matter how old you are, you will not want to, you should not have to, it isn’t fair, or right, or kind, and, inevitably, despite your skin creams and lipstick, slowly if we’re lucky, in the quiet twilight of our years as members of the living, across the many uncertain dawns of political eras, without the soundtrack of bullets, or much fanfare at all, our students will replace us. And when they’re better, really truly better at all of this than we are, we might begrudgingly let them.
And if we don’t? For the betterment of their world that was once ours, there will be war.
Rosette Cirillo is a teacher and writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is a lecturer at Harvard University, and a core faculty member of their Teaching and Teacher Leadership program.