AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

Deborah Correa’s debut feature The War Between (2024), presents an usual setting for a Western, set in Arizona Territory early on in the American Civil War. It finds two soldiers from opposing allegiances, each stranded in the desert following a battle, forced to tolerate one another for the best chance of survival. Union abolitionist Israel (Damian Conrad-Davis) constantly degrades the Apache people, and the Confederate Moses (Sam Bullington) fights to continue the enslavement of Blacks and surprisingly has familiarised himself enough with the Apache to learn their language and advocates (against his Union counterpart) for the more humane treatment of the Apache Great Seer (Wayne Charles Baker).

With the premise, Correa and screenwriter Ron Yungul tee themselves up with what would appear to be a noble cause — the depolarisation of the current political atmosphere in the United States — but inadvertently sideline their project through the projection of 21st-century America onto the Civil War, a conflict over the right to enslave people based on their skin colour. The real-life stakes of the Civil War – enslavement – are minimised for a morally questionable pitch for bipartisanship and interpersonal harmony.

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Through the eyes of the white man

The political-moral development of the characters never completes the lesson it hopes to impart. While Israel, in his encounter with the Great Seer, is forced to confront his racial bigotry toward Indigenous peoples, the script never requires any moral lift of Moses apart from the compartmentalisation of his political allegiances to make friends with an enemy combatant. Israel too undergoes a superficial moral transformation, at best. His enemies to (platonic) lovers’ experience with Moses sees right through one of this nation’s original sins — the enslavement of its Black citizens — despite his personal history of being best friends with a formerly enslaved person. Perhaps I’m dedicating too much space to something that’s ultimately absent from the film. The story is not really about racism but about white people learning about racism. The latter interests me a lot less than the former on this side of the 21st century. If The War Between was more willing to confront the actual violence of the Civil War, it would find itself necessarily grappling with the experiences of the country’s Black residents. But the only Black experience here comes mediated through the flashbacks of a white man, a white man whose father happened to formerly own the Black man.

Correa denies the serious moral drama one would expect of the premise and instead shoots for a story about the setting aside of political difference and, as a result, rather quickly simmers into bothsideism (equivocating about a condemnable action by falsely stating that people on both sides are equally responsible). The plot instantly recalls Danis Tanović’s 2001 Oscar-winning No Man’s Land set in the trenches of the Bosnian War, but by transporting the story away from the narrow trenches to the more sprawling American Southwest while also making a much less indicting film toward those with power than Tanović’s excellent debut, The War Between ends up merely reminding the viewer of a more profound and less simplistic film.

False equivalences

Moses and Israel lack the same moral complexity as Donald Trump when he infamously commented about there being “very fine people” on both sides of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Sure, both men are indecent pricks but neither are truly complex. In our interview with Correa and Yungul, the former revealed their own hand: “I really liked that neither character was ‘good’. They each have their bigotries and biases.” Admittedly, the Trump analogy is unfair to a degree; he compared white supremacists with their righteous counter protestors, and although the Union soldier of the film is fighting for abolition, he’s far from a saint and symbolises the federal government’s attitude that nourished genocidal ambition toward Indigenous Americans. Israel’s racism and hatred of Indigenous peoples, while not irrelevant to the plot, is ancillary or even divorced from the actual outcomes of the war. Also, if it needs to be said, racism — while always inexcusable and vile — does not hold a torch to the gravity of a war with the freedom of an entire race of people on the line (plus his myopic vision of civil rights develops a smidge).

The script admittedly manages to move some emotions through the interpersonal relational developments between the loftily named Moses and Israel, though this success hardly distracts from the way the film ends up leaning into Indigenous stereotypes and casting issues. Wayne Charles Baker’s character is only ever at the service of his white superiors and ends up being their “angelic” savior. There is even one point where Moses opines about God’s role in protecting the two travelers throughout the conflict and says, “I feel like his angels are all around us.” Just as he finishes the sentence, editor Chris Bradley cuts to the Apache man who had, in a prior scene, saved his two white captors from bushwhackers. At the end of the day, the character exists only to interfere with the misshapen moral map of Israel, a white man. The Apache man is Israel’s “magical negro”.

Not all heroes wear capes, not all soldiers are heroes

Following a dramatic Oscar-bait type speech advocating peace by a character introduced moments prior, the film ends with text proudly publicising that veterans worked on the film and a support message for The Heroes Journey, an organisation that “helps our nation’s defenders and their families, and families of the fallen find their voice and tell their story.” But not all soldiers are heroes. Heroes aren’t anyone who meets the call of war – hopefully, few would call fallen Nazi or Isis combatants heroes – but only those who respond to the call of a just war with dignity and valour. It’s an impossible and careless contradiction for a Confederate soldier like Moses to be added to the list of fallen “heroes”.

This is almost as careless as the simplistic equation of “veteran” with “hero” that the end title cards endorse — and through this endorsement, the filmmakers leave the viewer with the distasteful decision to interpret the actions of the men in the film as “heroic.” In truth, they are racist cowards. And so were many of the men and women who have died “defending” the United States.

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Donald Trump is pictured at the top of this article. The other image is a still from The War Between.