I avoid all insulting manufactured propaganda events, so when Civil War came out earlier this year, I ignored it. But it made itself available tonight when I wasn't looking for it. So, in a moment of morbid curiosity, I watched it. It isn't garbage.
It's pineapple pizza.
Pineapple pizza is for people who swallow their food whole, without even taking it out of the box. Pythons and woke Hollywood movie executives alike have been observed in their natural habitat swallowing gazelles, naive movie audiences, and unopened boxes of pineapple pizza whole. Pineapple pizza is worse than garbage, because the word "garbage" implies the inedible leftovers of an otherwise consumable product. The garbage might be the box, or some burnt cheese on the plate, or a piece of crust nobody wants. But the box was in fact opened and the contents were actually consumed. A culture that produces garbage has produced something of value first.
A culture that produces pineapple pizza is a culture full of boxes nobody wants to open.
Civil War is woke, racist propaganda, pretending to be neutral. It's not even garbage.
It's pineapple pizza, posing as pepperoni.
At first, I liked it better than I thought I would. I like the cast, and the film has some interesting sequences and imagery; the director obviously belongs behind the camera of a 90s music video. But by the end, I got tired of being insulted and actually skipped it, which I never do. 20 minutes out, I had had my fill of pineapple, and decided not to even finish whatever slices remained in the pan. I wasn't even full. I just didn't want it anymore.
Apparently, the film bills itself as politically neutral, which is like being called a racist by a member of the KKK, or somebody wearing a Juneteenth T-shirt. Pretending that Civil War is neutral is an act of pure Orwellian double-think, like pretending "gender is a spectrum," or that pineapple is a legitimate pizza topping.
It simply isn't true.
Pineapple Traumatic Stress Disorder is real
It may not be obvious, but if you have to put your brains, heart, and soul on the shelf to be entertained, you are better off not being entertained. Do anything else. If you are not aware when your "suspension of disbelief" reflex is being trained to swallow more transparent nonsense, you have become the transparent nonsense, and are in the process of being swallowed.
I don't care if Civil War didn't have the budget of Black Hawk Down or Saving Private Ryan; I can look through that. But you don't take every obsolete, Bush-era liberal archetype and pit them against a racist stereotype of conservativism while pretending not to take sides, unless you actually think you're smarter than other people, and are actually fooling them.
Woody Allen has said that he never writes down to his audience, and always assumes they're smarter than he is. It's one of the reasons his movies are so smart. Civil War is the opposite of that. It speaks to its audience as though they were a bunch of feeder mice in a cage, waiting to be swallowed whole by the python of their own forgotten sense of discernment. Even the snipers have colored hair and fingernail polish.
In spite of a good cast, good performances, and a handful of other ingredients that mask the cloying message of the obsolete, liberal pineapple within, Civil War is not entertainment. It's not even garbage, or the leftovers of entertainment. Civil War is pure pineapple pizza. It's what happens when you allow your discernment and personal standards to be swallowed by a condescending python after having been squeezed to death.
One is leftovers, the other should never be opened, even in lockdown. And if you do open it, it's because 8 months have gone by since its release, and you didn't even know it was in your freezer.
Know the difference.
