Edition 47: Columbia University and Film 101
We're shooting B-roll for Alex Garland's new movie, right?
University politics
Look how far we’ve come. Look how far we haven’t. In 1968 the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) occupied Columbia University in protest of the Vietnam War. It was not just a bunch of peacenik stoners preaching world peace; they specifically targeted Columbia’s hitherto unannounced partnership with the Institute for Defense Analyses — a weapons think-tank tied to the Department of Defence. The SDS brought the war to campus and demanded the administration account for its complicity. Thousands of students seized buildings across the campus and held the acting dean hostage for 24 hours. Columbia’s president called in the police and there were two days of violent dispersal. 132 students and 12 cops were injured. 700 people ended up in cuffs.
Today Columbia prides itself on the ‘68 protests. What a fertile place of learning it must have been to have generated such principled action! Radicalism is always appreciated after the fact. Other aspects are not so easily included in the official memory: the division between black and white student groups, concern over the university’s encroachment into Harlem, and plans for a segregated gymnasium. Today Columbia University sprawls even further into historically Black neighbourhoods and is in possession of a segregated campus in Israel. Most Palestinian students would not be permitted to step foot in Columbia Global campus in Tel Aviv.
This week we saw another wave of protests at Columbia. A tent city sprouted on university lawns. Its inhabitants took up real estate and laid out demands for President Minouche Shafik. We heard a general criticism of the daily horrors being inflicted on Gaza’s civilian population and a specific demand that Columbia divest from corporates that have contracts with the Israeli government and military. Targeting the $13bn endowment stakes in Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft is ambitious. The encampment was joined by hundreds of faculty staff who held their own demonstration in support. It was forcefully cleared on Wednesday by the police; though far less dramatically than in 1968. Another divergence: the protesters immediately reclaimed their territory and refused to budge.
It’s not just Columbia, of course. There were ugly lines of National Guards frog-marching around the University of Texas Austin. Emory University’s philosophy department chair getting cuffed in Atlanta. Students and Jewish activists occupying the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Dozens arrested at the University of Southern California. A new student encampment popped up at Harvard yesterday. But I’ve been programmed to believe that New York is the centre of the universe so we’ll stay north of West 110th.
Columbia has educated a fascinating cross-section of America: Amelia Earhart, Julia Stiles, both Roosevelts, and both Gyllenhaals. The dude from Vampire Weekend and Dwight Eisenhower. No fewer than three Nobel Economics laureates. If the institution will only tolerate radical student activism on the proviso that it occurred in the distant past, then perhaps their notable alumni page can provide more satisfying responses.
Let’s take a moment to consider how Howard Zinn may have responded to this week’s events. In the Second World War a young Zinn was flying as a bombardier in the air force. One mission changed him irrevocably. In the dying days of the war, when German surrender was fait accompli, he dropped napalm on a French town. Thousands died — German soldiers and French civilians alike. On his return to America Zinn received his Masters and PhD from Columbia. He would go on to become one the great sociologists of his generation. In the 1960s he advised the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from his position as head of Spelman College’s history department. In 1968, just a month before his alma mater was wracked with demonstrations, Zinn flew to Hanoi on a peace mission to negotiate the release of downed American pilots. It was in the middle of the Tet Offensive. In 1971 he uttered haunting words at an anti-war protest, “They’ll say we are disturbing the peace but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war.”
We don’t need to imagine what his views on Israel’s callous air war on Gaza would be. He wrote extensively on the misuse of American airpower in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dresden, Hanoi, and Baghdad.
Recall that in the midst of the Gulf War, the US military bombed an air raid shelter, killing 400 to 500 men, women, and children who were huddled to escape bombs. The claim was that it was a military target, housing a communications center, but reporters going through the ruins immediately afterward said there was no sign of anything like that. I suggest that the history of bombing—and no one has bombed more than this nation—is a history of endless atrocities, all calmly explained by deceptive and deadly language like "accident", "military target", and "collateral damage".
He was a lifelong campaigner for a more just world. I would recommend you read his memoir You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train. Were he still with us, he’d likely be sitting on a camp chair in the forecourt of Columbia with a gaggle of adoring history undergrads.
Who else might may we glean some understanding from? Well, look who it is on the alumni page, the alpha and omega herself: Ursula K. Le Guin.
“The shift from denial of injustice to recognition of injustice can’t be unmade. What your eyes have seen they have seen. Once you see the injustice, you can never again in good faith deny the oppression and defend the oppressor. What was loyalty is now betrayal. From now on, if you don’t resist, you collude. But there is a middle ground between defense and attack, a ground of flexible resistance, a space opened for change. It is not an easy place to find or live in.”
Or what about the great educator John Dewey? A man who moved forward the teaching of teaching by generations. He stated in his magnum opus, My Pedagogic Creed, “to prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities”. Education is not receiving established wisdom; it is empowerment.
We sure as hell know what Upton Sinclair thought about rallies: he lived at them.
Maybe, then, one final thought from a famed Columbia graduate, Isaac Asimov. From one of his short stories we have a message pure as driven snow:
“In a good cause, there are no failures. There are only delayed successes.”
I didn’t really want to bring up Alex Garland’s new film Civil War (2024). Firstly, because I am not a film reviewer; you come to me for facts masquerading as opinions, not the opposite. Secondly, because it’s not very good. But time makes a mockery of us all and here we are. For the blissfully ignorant who have not seen the film: the audience is parachuted into the dying days of the second American civil war. An authoritarian president seized a third term in Washington and states peeled off the union in open revolt. And that's about the long and short of it when it comes to the prehistory. We do not know the political stripe of said president. But we do know that both California and Texas — states with broadly opposing statehouses and overall vibes — are allied against Washington.
This is an artistic choice and a bad one at that. The contrivance, as has been unsubtly explained in every post-release interview, is that in not ascribing party politics to the despot, Americans can avoid polarised interpretation. Rarely have I seen a director treat his audience with such naked condescension. It is obviously and utterly a film responding to the presidency of Donald Trump. Excising any meaningful context is a pretty skimpy fig-leaf for the filmmaker’s own presumptions. I’m aware I’m veering into Garth Marenghi’s lane (“I know writers who use subtext and they’re all cowards”) but the dearth of detail is just silly. It’s ragoût sans mirepoix. Garland skips straight to browning off protein and adding water. The strongest elements (Kirsten Dunst, the moreish Jesse Plemons, superb sound design) remain oddly unincorporated, suspended in a thin and unconvincing bouillon.
The protagonists are journalists having a hoon around battle-scarred America in the hope of interviewing the bad president. With war reporters in the centre of the frame we necessarily lose focus on people, the actual people subjected to the great weight of unexplained historical forces. They are relegated to the corner of the shot, as inert and inattentive as Garland’s conceived audience. The civilians are crude sketches: downtrodden but hopeful refugees, cartoonishly evil hillbillies, heavily armed and parochial rural types. Each can move the plot forward; none can hold perspective. Only hard-bitten-but-well-meaning journos can be trusted with the lens.
Weirdly, though not unsurprisingly, the director picked up a bad habit from his protagonists: subject/object confusion. Some journalists act as though The Story has osmotic characteristics and bask in the glow. Garland seems to believe that a film about journalism is journalism. In this interview he makes this literal, “they’re reporters, its an old-fashion form of journalism which is deliberately trying to remove bias… and the film is trying to function like a reporter itself, its trying to remove its own bias and just showing you a sequence of events in the way a journalist would.” How principled. How naive.
Garland is mournful of the days when good journalism could change the world. He used the Vietnam War as an example — when the reality of fighting a losing land war in Asia was underscored in every news bulletin. Everyone knows how important Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers was to shifting public opinion. But as a global community we place far too much emphasis on what public opinion counts for inside the United States. The illegal bombing campaign of Laos and Cambodia — some of the most egregious war crimes in human history — intensified after the New York Times and Washington Post published Ellsberg’s work. Knowledge without action is meaningless.
There is no such thing as an anti-war film but for all Garland’s hand-wringing Civil War reinforces the utility of political violence (spoiler alert: the bad president gets got). The final action sequences unfold like a first-person shooter. In all honesty the film confused me. There wasn’t even a hint of foreign powers (Mexico, Canada, China, Russia, whoever) backing various state militias! Portraying an American civil war as an American phenomenon is ahistorical — the last one certainly wasn’t — and cuddles into the ideological safety blanket that the imperial core acts upon the rest of the world with impunity. The events at Columbia this week put paid to that: the periphery has come home.
Ending the film with a needle drop of Suicide’s Dream Baby Dream was painfully Adam Curtis-pilled but we do love to hear it, don’t we folks? One truly ascendent song aside, Civil War is a gorgeously shot and spiritually timid advertisement for eating more vegetables (you idiots). The lessons will continue until morale improves. I’d love to know what is running through Garland’s mind when he sees professors being dragged across bitumen or the police snipers atop the Memorial Union building at Indiana University. Surely such footage is Garland’s missing link — unfortunately it is happening under the wrong president. Remember, democracy is on the ballot this November, kids.
Grazie mille,
Tom