SUBSCRIBER PREMIUM: The Horror and Spectacle of "Civil War" (the film)
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Brad is joined by his brother, Dr. Brian Onishi, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Penn State Altoona, to breakdown the politics, horror, spectacle, and meanings of "Civil War" - the new film out now.
Weird Wonder by Dr. Brian Onishi: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-48027-0
Eugene Thacker (magic circle): https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/zer0-books/our-books/in-the-dust-of-this-planet
Hollywood Reporter (about 50/50 split between conservative and liberal viewership): https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/civil-war-red-states-and-blue-states-1235875216/
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, here today with a bonus surprise, who knew it was coming episode about the Civil War movie.
And here to join me is someone you never knew was coming.
You had no idea.
This is like, you would have never guessed this.
And that is You guessed it, my brother, Brian Onishi.
Yes, that's right.
There's a Brad Onishi, and there's a Brian Onishi, and we look a lot alike.
We are the exact same height.
We have the exact same body structure, and many people think we're twins.
So, Brian, thanks for being here.
I'm happy to be here.
This is exciting.
So people need to know about you.
Not only are you my brother, but you have made decisions like mine in life to become an academic.
So we are two people in the same family who are philosophers and humanists.
And just so everyone listening knows, this would have never been an expected outcome in our family.
Like our dad went to Cal State LA.
He was the first person to ever go to college in our entire family, either side.
He majored in business.
So the idea that he would have two sons who got PhDs in philosophy of some kind, no one would ever thought this.
Our parents did not go to Yale.
Our parents did not meet at Cal State Berkeley when they were playing Stanford in the football game.
None of that.
We are not that family.
So you are a professor at Penn State Altoona.
And so we're going to talk a little bit about how your location in Pennsylvania played into your review and understanding of this film.
You're also the author of Weird Wonder and Merleau-Ponty Object-Oriented Ontology and New Materialism, which came out from Palgrave Macmillan just a few months ago.
And that's a really cool book if you are into wonder or phenomenology or anything related to these fields of study.
It's got one of the coolest covers I've ever seen.
You're also the founder of the Society for the Study of the Eco-Weird.
And we're going to talk more about that.
And you're also, in the works, going to produce and create your own podcast called Horror Joy.
And that's going to be all about the horror genre and things you study.
So tell us a little bit about that real quick.
Like, you are a professor of philosophy.
What is horror?
Why would you want to make a podcast about it for people to understand anything about that genre?
Yeah, big reason is because I really like horror.
And part of the reason why I like horror is because of these kind of big ideas that are present in horror.
We can talk about so many different things.
Freud has talked about the uncanny.
We have this idea where we are understanding the terror and the horrors of our day through horror.
I think we end up fixating on this kind of sadistic, violent imagery in horror rather than those ideas.
So, podcast ideas to talk about two things, those big ideas, but also I've noticed that people in the horror community, they get together, they talk about horror, and they're pleasant, joyful people.
There's something joyful about that kind of connection.
And so my colleague here at Pensée del Tuna, Jeffrey Stoyanoff, and I are going to start this podcast called Horror Joy.
We're excited about it.
Yeah, there's more coming from us.
We'll be talking about it on Axis Moody and on our show.
And so you'll hear more.
We both went into horror.
You study the horror genre.
I study Christian nationalism.
Both of them are grotesque in their own ways.
All right, let's do it.
Civil War.
Uh, you go to the movies a lot.
You're, you and our other brother Blake are, yes, we are Brad, Brian, and Blake.
Yes, people.
Just get over it.
Okay?
Don't email me about it.
I want to hear it.
Okay?
So you and Blake are like really good about going to the film.
You guys are like film aficionados and you especially are like somebody who watches film in almost all categories.
Could be drama, could be horror, could be, you know, anything.
And you, you know about it.
I went to see this And I'm not going to lie to you, Brian, I can't remember the last time I went to a movie since... This is the first time I've gone to the movie probably since before the pandemic, I think.
Like 2019.
So, we saw Civil War.
Now, a lot of people, including myself, when they saw the trailer for this were worried it was going to be a kind of flammable political work, and it's really not that.
So, we're going to get into some big themes, some themes I think that you have ruminated on as somebody who thinks about horror a lot, and I just would have never thought of on my own.
But give me your first impression.
Let's just do the emotional fan thing.
Did you like it?
Did you not like it?
Did you enjoy this movie?
Did you have fun?
Was it worth the $10 to go sit in the theater or not?
Yeah, so I have the subscription thing.
So yeah, I can go three times a week, same cost.
Loved it.
So, I will say that I personally really liked this movie.
I went into it, like you said, kind of not having a clear idea of what was going to be depicted ideologically.
But the things that I kept kind of coming back to, and again, because I'm thinking about horror all the time, I thought to myself, well, is this a horror movie?
Is this going to be a horror movie?
And so this distinction that I use, right, where we talk about genre fiction, fantasy, science fiction, horror.
Fantasy is, right, this world that is not ours but could have been.
And the things there, like wizards and ogres and elves and all those things, they're normal there.
Science fiction are worlds that could be.
They're our world, maybe in the future.
So our world could be that world in the future.
Horror are those worlds where it's our world right now and something breaks through or shows up that should not be.
Sometimes it's a monster, sometimes it's madness.
So...
I went in thinking like, oh, is this going to be a horror movie?
And I, there were times when I was pulled in as a horror movie fan.
And there were times when I was like, this is not a horror movie.
And there's more to say about that, but just the experience of, of, uh, I think that the film did a good job of pulling me in, making me feel something emotionally.
And then almost kind of dragging me back out of it and then pulling me in again.
It was a kind of feeling of going through in waves, really.
I agree with that because that's... I enjoyed it.
Like, I'm happy to have spent the ten bucks to go have seen it and not wait for it to come out four months from now on the TV or whatever.
And I think it's because, and I want to talk more about this with you in a minute, the visuals of this film are actually pretty stunning.
It really feels like you're watching a photo essay within a war movie.
Like, the war scenes are vivid and brutal, and then there's these snapshot moments where you're supposed to see the scene through the lens of the photographer, the war journalist, whether it's Kirsten Dunst, whether it's some of the other characters.
Those images themselves I think are emotionally captivating and they really did have an effect on me.
I will say the dialogue in this movie is like a 13-year-old boy trained AI to write dialogue, and that's just me.
We talked about this offline, you were nicer about it, which is probably normal for the two of us, you being nicer, but there is just no sense of the dialogue doing any work to like Develop the characters connect the characters to one another that the characters never Emotionally are drawn to each other by way of dialogue.
It's all through action and experience and going through war together There's never a moment in my mind where like somebody really wrote a scene that two characters achieved something And after that scene, you felt as if they were like, there's a moment where Kirsten Dunst and the young journalist, Jessie, are sitting in the stands at a stadium, a football stadium.
And like, Jessie is like developing film and she's nervous to show the Kirsten Dunst character the film because she's like her hero or whatever.
And Kirsten Dunst looks at one that's supposed to be the winner, like the keeper.
And the line is literally like, that's a really good photo.
And you're like, what?
What?
What?
All right.
Cool.
Good.
Yeah.
Did that go through like 12 rounds of editing?
Okay.
Fine.
That's good.
So anyway.
I'll push back here, right?
And I think that the dialogue, I was not distracted by the dialogue for sure.
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And I would even argue, I saw this a second time, that there may be something deliberate about this, right?
Two things happen.
One, Leigh, that's Kirsten Dunst.
Yeah, Leigh, yeah.
She's clearly not good at connecting to people emotionally.
Sure, sure.
And you're right, Jesse, the young, kind of up-and-coming photojournalist, she's also really nervous.
And so the scene between them, I think you can see this is just really awkwardly written, but there's also, I think, something charmingly awkward about it.
Like if this was like a beautifully written scene where, you know, Lee decides to just kind of wax poetically about the kind of love of taking pictures We've already seen these kind of flashbacks to these awful images.
I think the worst images in the whole film is her flashback to her experience in war, right?
And so I think this pushes forward that jaded aspect where she's not connected with somebody for a long time.
And so for me, again, it's not distracting.
And I think there's a read where this is even charmingly awkward rather than... Yeah.
You know, I think there's a read where this is deliberate.
I think... All fair points.
I think you can be... I agree.
And I hear... I take your point and I'll think about it.
I think you can be charmingly awkward while also not... Yeah, I don't know.
I gotta think about it.
It really just felt like...
This stunning visual work and a, uh, a dialogical component that was just like what you expect from a Transformers movie or something.
Like, like that level of sort of, oh yeah, here's a Transformers movie where the 13 year olds in here are just like so stoked to see Optimus Prime and no one cares that he just said, that's a really good photo.
Like, I don't know.
That's, that's what I was thinking is like, oh, Optimus Prime would have said that or like, Someone in that kind of film.
So, all right.
Let me give you my take on why this is not going to be a politically flammable film, and then I want to go into the themes you mentioned, because those are ones I would have never thought of my own.
So, going into this, I was like, okay.
What's the war?
What's the war about?
What are the politics of the war?
And the film largely leaves that out.
We don't know why California and Texas are on the same side.
It even seems that California and Texas and Florida are all aligned against what is called the United States and against the federal government.
And Florida and Texas in 2024 might be likely allies in this, but certainly not California.
I came away thinking this is on purpose.
It's a discombobulated alliance that I can't even conjure or conceive of why this would happen now.
And that was on purpose.
You can't extract anything from this.
You can't say, "Oh, this probably happened." Like if it was like California plus New York and they were coming from two sides, right, Or if it was California, New York, Massachusetts, I'd be like, well, all the liberals against all, right?
Or if it was like California and Washington, but like Eastern Washington had like broken off, Spokane was like, nope.
So it's like California, Portland, and Seattle.
Then I'm like, okay, now I see what you guys are doing.
That's not the case here.
So I think what they're trying to do is say like, hey, don't try to figure out the politics of why they're at war.
The point is, and there's a scene on this, Brian, and I'm wondering what you think, where there's a sniper in a house and the guys who are outside the house firing at the sniper and getting fired at.
They keep getting asked, like, what side are you on?
And they're like, there is a guy shooting at us.
We're shooting at him.
Those are the sides.
And I feel like that's kind of what the film wants you.
It's not.
It's about the journey and the spectacle and the visual.
It's not about, well, how did Texas get with California?
I'm going to go home and like write out a whole diagram of as to how that would happen.
So I think that's number one.
This is not going to pit Fox News against MSNBC because I think the film intentionally did that.
You live in small town Pennsylvania, you live in a different part of the country to me.
Does that resonate at all or what do you think?
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