I have been watching Devs on Hulu this past week (I'll probably post about it here when I'm done) and this Youtube channel with sci-fi commentary I generally enjoy had a piece on the creator of the show, Alex Garland's later movie "Civil War". Watching it (though I haven't seen the movie yet), I found the final lines on the piece to be fascinating.
The context: the essay makes the claim that the movie was not about the war itself or the political circumstances around it, but how the media covers it.
So here's the transcript of the part that had me do a double take. (The video essay was released in 2024)
Only the United States could LARP a performative president all the way to totalitarian tyrant because only the United States has professional wrestling. Kayfabe is the name used in professional wrestling for the complex layers of knowledge required to enjoy this fake sport. Audiences know that the Undertaker isn't a supernatural serial killer but hoot and hiss just like he is. And if the audience engage in the kayfabe enthusiastically enough, their fan favorite might eventually get chosen by the promoters to win the title. The national political LARP of the United States has its own kayfabe. Trump is a former WWE showman. He knows the game. He LARPs as a strongman authoritarian leader. His supporters lap it up and his haters boo and hiss. And then the LARP and kayfabe turn real on January 6th. Many of those now imprisoned and their supporters like the delusional cucumber shaman still believe they were players in the insurrection LARP. But the heavily armed far-right militia men among the LARPers were all too real. This is what Civil War warns against. Not the horrors of war, which are quite clear, and not even the threat of tyranny, but that both war and tyranny will explode from treating democracy as a spectator entertainment. That the participants will lose track of the kayfabe and the Culture War LARP will turn into a violently real Civil War.