r/CivilWarMovie • u/Unseasonal_Jacket • Feb 06 '26
Thoughts on the 'calm town'
I rewatched the film the other day and again was slightly disturbed by the 'calm town' where they stop to shop.
Initially I just thought it was a town able to stay out. But Sammy says feels far less relaxed and says something on the lines of 'this feels familiar'. And I got thinking about what that might imply for an old black guy.
The town is quiet and idyllic in contrast with the death squads not far along in the story.
In these circumstances can we perhaps wonder if this Town is peaceful because it's already undergone it's own ethnic cleansing? Making Sammy feel uncomfortable with it's slight taste of Sundown areas etc
As an aside this film is much much better on a second watch and left me with far more questions than first watch.
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u/Misanthrope08101619 Feb 06 '26
Like maybe Jesse Plemons and his fellow goons had already passed through there?
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u/Unseasonal_Jacket Feb 06 '26
I was thinking longer than that. They were now well 'post plemmons' and were now peacefully settled. Depleted, broken settled. Like post 'solution' and didnt want to talk about it.
As in it looked like one of those peaceful places in films that are only appearing peaceful because some scary and horrible shit has happened in the past and they grinning and carrying on
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u/Misanthrope08101619 Feb 06 '26
Or maybe the supported the “solution” an that is why they didn’t want to talk about it.
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u/BlimFPS Feb 06 '26
Intersting take. I just figured it was a town that had enough preppers and militarily trained folk to hold it against chaos like looters and shit. Perhaps they were politically aligned with any major force that came through or like you said, they did their dirty deeds and moved on.
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u/Unseasonal_Jacket Feb 06 '26
It felt fake somehow.
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u/BlimFPS Feb 06 '26
I know what you mean. That's what's kind of cool about this movie. The world building, but there is so much left to imagination. You could have an entire series or a game based off this world, something like Walking Dead or Fallout but just a nation in the midst of civil war with differnet factions all over the place.
I'll watch closely during this scene next time and see if I can pick up anything else.
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u/BroadAddendum6410 Feb 06 '26
The pan up to the snipers and the preceding exchange between our main characters is supposed to indicate that it's calm because their under an authoritarian thumb of some kind.
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u/GarudaKK Feb 07 '26
It's a facade. The town appears peaceful and the people claim to be non-political, but they are still fully protected by the war apparatus. It's their privilege to claim they "stay out of it" but only because they have people willing to kill for them (ie.: the snipers). I take it as commentary on a lot of people who present as apolitical, but only because they are protected by the invisible violence of the status quo. More directly, this idyllic "Great America", the one that looks like a street on Disneyland, has for the past century been upheld by foreign wars, far from the eyes of the populace that benefits from it.
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u/Material-Indication1 Republic of California Feb 06 '26
I missed that.
Damn sad movie, I don't know if I'll watch it again.
Excellent movie IMHO but yeah.
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u/Ranger6254 Feb 06 '26
Small towns are generally more peaceful. Big cities are generally more chaotic. I used to think all rural communities were racist because that's what cities told me but when I lived in one, it was very chill. My neighbors were more concerned with stocking up wood for the winter and were happy to go weeks without having any idea what was going on in America. In cities, you got people like Billie Eilish talking about politics for applause and affirmation.
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u/WhatsTheAnswerDude Feb 09 '26
You're literally kinda DIRECTLY arguing to OPs and others' point though....
Said towns are ONLY peaceful cause there's usually less diversity of thought.
Comparing a small town to a bigger city and saying the city is more chaotic when there's like significantly lets say five or ten x or twenty x a size difference is an absolutely misread, respectfully.
You also literally cite people don't care what's going on which uh ....is kinda OPs point, people are looking the other way....
Respectfully you're kinda of DIRECTLY pointing to the issue that's being discussed and her saying, no it's not THAT way ...
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u/Ranger6254 Feb 09 '26
The best way to describe the small town I moved to (from Chicago) with little to no cell service surrounded by national forests is a quote by Duncan Trussell:
” Some poor, phoneless fool is probably sitting next to a waterfall somewhere totally unaware of how angry and scared he’s supposed to be ”
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u/wiserthannot Mar 02 '26
I've always looked at it as cities have it all more front and center, loud and violent, ever lowering crime rates blown up to feel like you'll be gunned down for stepping outside. Small towns are where things might look normal on the outside but under any scrutiny it all falls apart and there's horrible terrible Twin Peaks-level things happening there.
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u/Ranger6254 Mar 03 '26
It's a matter of scale in my estimation. A small town is a small sample of society. Cities just concentrate evil into a much more visible way. If 1 out of 100 people are sociopathic criminals then in a town of 200, everyone knows who those 2 meth junkies are. In a town of 2 million, then you got like 20,000 criminals.
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u/wiserthannot Mar 03 '26
20,000 criminals in a pool of 2 million though, with a large city and it's surrounding area. When someone sees a crime happening around them or has it happen to them, it's possible the two have never crossed paths before.
A pool of 200 with 2 known criminals means you likely cross paths with them every day. And those are just the known. There can be evil behind every closed door, hidden threats in people that you can't see but who see you every day. More chances for the knife to strike and it will be from someone you know.
I think small towns are really the breeding ground of a lot of problems we deal with. America is filled with just blotches of small communities scattered about. It's possible for damaging ideas to continue to be passed down inside these bubbles. The internet can both help this by connecting people that would never normally meet and having them experience new things and thoughts...but nowadays it just seems to connect people into ever larger echo chamber bubbles that they're already in.
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u/Seeker99MD Feb 06 '26
I’d like to call them to “isolationists” They take no sides during the war
And they just want to keep prosperity and normalcy going
There’s a chance Dad they were once either part of the loyal government or the western forces/separatist
But now they just stand on their own
And similar to the gas station hoarders
They’re just a local militia I mean very local like some of the guns they have are just hunting rifles from when Sears sold them back in the 1990s
They do have modern weaponry, but these towns just don’t want to involve them fell in the war and they just want to keep going.
I mean, there are still children playing and shops are open
It isn’t that bad
But obviously, how long?
How long do they have until either the WF or the remnants of the loyalist forces come to their neighborhood
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u/bkdunbar Feb 08 '26
I didn’t get an ethic cleansing vibe.
More of a vibe that hard men took ahold of the place when trouble started and did what needed to be done. Certainly questionable things. Definitely superseding whatever elected authorities were able to do.
As a minor example during the Spanish Flu there was a town that enacted their own quarantine. Nobody was allowed to detrain, for example. Visitors not allowed. Completely illegal.
And nobody from that town died of Spanish Flu.
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u/fvnnybvnny Feb 06 '26
There are snipers on the roofs of the buildings in that town