The Second Civil War (1997)
Lady Liberty is packing heat! And Dante is packing in the hee-hee-hees!
Some days it feels like our country is on the verge of civil war. Even more perplexingly, it sometimes feels like the President of the United States would be on the side of folks who take up arms against what they see as a corrupt and illegitimate government as long as they’re white and support him.
That seemed to be the message behind Trump’s deranged tweets urging the masses to “LIBERATE MINNESOTA”, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” and finally to “LIBERATE VIRGINIA and save your great second amendment. It is under siege!”
The corrupt and illegitimate governments the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES is encouraging his weak-minded, easily suggestible cultists to rise up against and liberate in defense of their sacred second amendment and, of course, for their constitutional, inalienable right to risk their lives and the lives of others so that they can take advantage of half price margarita night at TGI Fridays are of course state governments.
Miss these guys. They were great.
For Trump, Democratic governors and mayors are traitors in our midst who hate our country, its heroic police officers and soldiers and want to eliminate the constitution and institute Sharia Law. Trump has long been immersed in a one-sided Cold War of words with Democratic leaders; his desperate cry for Alt-Right types and gun fetishists to “LIBERATE” their states represented an escalation in rhetoric that was more or less uniformly dismissed as Trump being Trump.
Gremlins and Small Soldiers director Joe Dante is a brilliant satirist with a keen eye and ear for the absurd but I doubt that he could have imagined that Hawaiian shirt-clad groups of far-right-wing second amendment absolutists just itching for an opportunity to use all the nifty guns they’ve been stockpiling against the government in a second Civil War would call themselves “Boogaloo Boys” in honor of the campy 1980s Cannon break-dancing sequel Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.
The current unrest lends a bracing timeliness to Dante’s 1997 satire The Second Civil War, which feels ripped from today’s headlines. Dante’s wildly ambitious TV movie imagines a near future in which our nation is brought to the brink of Civil War over the issue of immigration.
Any resemblance to real events is purely intentional.
In a fit of furious ambition, Dante attempted nothing less than a contemporary Dr. Strangelove on a TV movie budget, with a whole lot of Network-style media satire thrown in for good measure.
To aid him in this Quixotic endeavor, the cult filmmaker put together one of the greatest casts in the history of TV movies: Beau Bridges, Joanna Cassidy, Phil Hartman, James Earl Jones, James Coburn, Dan Hedaya, Elizabeth Peña, Denis Leary, Ron Perlman, William Schallert, Kevin McCarthy, Kevin Dunn, Dick Miller, Robert Picardo, Brian Keith and Roger Corman.
Beau Bridges, the Jeff Bridges of television movies, leads a ridiculously loaded ensemble in the tricky lead role of Gov. Jim Farley, the controversial governor of Idaho, a fire-breathing populist who began his career as a Liberal but grew progressively more Conservative until he’s making international headlines for closing his state’s borders rather than accept a group of Pakistani orphans fleeing a nuclear incident.
The Governor should be, at the very least, an unsympathetic character. He is, after all, someone seemingly willing to risk a second Civil War rather than open his heart and his borders to ORPHANS FLEEING WAR AND TRAGEDY.
Yet Governor Farley emerges as an oddly likable figure in no small part because he is an anti-immigration hardliner second a lovestruck fool first. Elizabeth Pena plays Christina, the ferociously conflicted, understandably rage-filled object of the governor’s desire. She’s a Mexican immigrant and reporter for CNN-like cable news dynamo NN who has a hard time reconciling her pride and ethics with her romantic and sexual feelings towards a man who is desperate to win her heart even as he’s willing to resort to extreme tactics to keep her countrymen out.
Like the thematically similar Wag the Dog, which came out later the same year to wild acclaim, The Second Civil War understands how human stories, particularly those involving children and other vulnerable groups, can have a powerful, visceral effect on how people see the world, how an iconic image can have a greater impact than a thousand impassioned editorials.
Idaho’s high-profile refusal to accept the Pakistani immigrants spells big trouble for the President of the United Stared (Phil Hartman), a hilariously, poignantly ineffectual dolt who is all about strong, decisive action in theory and doing absolutely nothing that might compromise his political future or re-election in practice.
As played by Hartman, the President believes in nothing beyond his own success, popularity and re-election chances. In that respect he’s exactly like Donald Trump. He’s an empty vessel who is less a genuine leader than an overgrown man-child limply cosplaying at being a dynamic leader in a time of crisis.
For the President and his handlers, being president is less about providing genuine leadership than a series of heroic poses purloined from his predecessors in the White House.
In a cast full of ringers, Hartman is a standout. When Jack Buchan, a brassy PR consultant played by James Coburn tells him that if they’re not careful he’ll end up building houses with Jimmy Carter, Hartman’s President poignantly concedes, “I can’t even fix a faucet.”
The President is going to give the governor a seventy-two hour deadline to accept the orphans but when Jack tells him that the deadline would coincide exactly with Susan Lucci’s final episode on All My Children and consequently be a ratings loser, he calls a desperate audible and changes the deadline to 67 and a half hours so as not to compete with the sure-fire ratings grabber.
The President could care less about immigration or orphans or what’s right but he is extremely emotionally invested in Lucci’s final storyline.
The stand-off at the Idaho border explodes into nation-wide conflict as the Alamo is bombed by pro-immigrant forces while forces sympathetic to the Idaho governor retaliate by blowing up the Statue of Liberty on the grounds that the tired, the poor or the huddled masses are no longer welcome here.
The Governor is so head over heels in love that he barely notices that his tough-talking is on the verge of causing an international incident. The Second Civil War is a pitch-black satirical comedy both timely and uncannily prescient but it’s also a romantic comedy of sorts as well as a drama about professionals trying to retain their dignity and self-respect as their world spirals into madness.
What separates The Second Civil War from Wag the Dog and Dr. Strangelove is a core of passionate idealism epitomized by Jim Kalla (James Earl Jones), a noble, heroic reporter in the Walter Cronkite mold who makes journalism seem like the principled realm of eloquent truth-tellers serving the public good.
Jim Kalla is also The Second Civil War’s narrator, so even though we watch this political kerfuffle from many sides it’s ultimately Jones’ paragon of journalistic ethics who has the final word and his narration is a universe away from the crackling dark comedy of the rest of the movie.
It would be easy for our newsman narrator to come across as a one-dimensional Saint. Jim Kalla is less a profoundly good man than the living embodiment of dignity but Jones makes the character human as well as heroic. He’s a welcome reminder that principled people are still attracted to the overlapping worlds of cable news and politics even if they are unmistakably in the minority.
The Second Civil War is relentlessly cynical but it is not nihilistic. It believes in the principles our nation was founded upon and it believes in the power of journalism to open people’s eyes to injustice and expose hard truths. That earnest belief in democracy and a free press marks it unmistakably as the product of an earlier, more hopeful era that looks like our own except that everything doesn’t seem quite so innately doomed.
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