Guns

Recently I watched One Battle After Another and Civil War (2024) immediately after. Both movies depict an despotic America that has maximized on terrorism. An America that is already here. On our neighbors and on our citizens. They also depict an America where that total state control is impractical due to how resistance in the American context can proliferate. A saturation of firearms amongst the civilian populace creates a terrain on which totalitarianism could be impractical. This is now an endorsement of guns as a solution to political problems but a description of the United States as it is.

Neither film really argued that armed populaces are morally good or that gun ownership prevents tyranny in some principled sense. The Second Amendment is never invoked. Constitutional arguments are absent. Instead, the films treat the presence of hundreds of millions of firearms as a geographical fact like the Rocky Mountains or the interstate highway system. The guns are simply there and distributed across the population, and any political development must contend with this reality.

In Civil War, this manifests as a patchwork of armed factions, none of which can achieve dominance. The journalists drive through zones controlled by different groups who each hold territory by force of arms. The state exists in some places and not others. In One Battle After Another, the revolutionary cell French 75 operates against a fascistic apparatus, but they survive not because they are righteous but because the state cannot be everywhere at once. The oppression is real, but it is also incomplete.

Both films reject the possibility of opting out. The journalists in Civil War attempt to maintain professional detachment and to document without participating. This stance kills them repeatedly. It offered no protection against the White supremacist with a rifle and operated their own roadside checkpoint. Bob in One Battle After Another thought living off the grid and disappearing from his revolutionary past would protect him from violence, but the state found him anyway. There is no peace to be chosen when violence has chosen you.

Both films share a political vision that there is no choice between violence and nonviolence because violence is present. There is a choice if you will be armed when it arrives to you. It is a peculiar form of American exceptionalism. America is not too virtuous for authoritarianism. It is too large, decentralized, and armed for authoritarianism to fully consolidate. An European dystopia is imagined and materialized as one where there is a totalizing surveillance state in which resistance is impossible. An American dystopia, one we are in, is messier. A fragmented tyranny that can brutalize but not pacify. Can neither fully control a city that is too large in number to oppress, or an hinterland that is too sparse to occupy. Helicopters cannot deploy everywhere. 10,000 soldiers is too little a number vs 2.7 million civilians in Chicago.

Yet there will be violence. There will be kidnap squads by freshly hired angry men who have never been able to hold down a job in their life. There will be military firing upon unarmed protestors. There will be tanks on the street, and military officers in tandem with LEOs storming high schools. It is happening right now. Survival here only depends on luck, geography, and hope that your own weapon buys you enough time. The films do not suggest that this outcome is desirable, but they suggest that it is inevitable given the material conditions that already exist.

Both films depict guns as neutral tools that cut in all directions. In Civil War the same firearms allow loose white supremacist militias taking advantage of the lack of state to terrorize travelers also allow the Western Forces to eventually storm DC and execute the despot. In One Battle After Another, the same weapons that ICE agents use to separate citizens from their families are used by the French 75 to liberate concentration camps. The gun does not know who is holding it. It does not distinguish between oppressor and oppressed.

It is an uncomfortable symmetry for viewers who want a clear moral. The suggestion that outcome of armed conflict depends not on justice but on logistics, numbers, and willingness to kill. The films do not celebrate this. They observe it. And in observing it, they argue that anyone who wishes to survive in such a landscape must reckon with the tools available rather than the tools they might prefer.

The United States contains the conditions for authoritarian brutality and executes it. It also contains the conditions that make such brutality contestable. The guns are here. They are used to oppress you. There is only one question. Will you use it back? Against the despotic president? Against your white supremacist neighbor who has decided you should not exist? Look at this terrain clearly and without the comfort of believing that institutions or principles will protect you when civilian ran checkpoints are setup and someone with a rifle asks what kind of American you are.