On the occasion of The Civil Dead’s theatrical release in the UK, courtesy of Beyond Interpretation and Bulldog Film Distribution, I thought it would be a good idea to put words to screen about the film, quietly one of my favorites of 2023. I first encountered The Civil Dead in early 2023 while looking for titles to program in this series. I hadn’t programmed an outright comedy before, and thought it would be fun to do so in the contexts I had originally envisioned for the series when it took the form of my grad school final project. At that time I was interested in two things: First, programming small, independent American films outside of America, with a special focus on films without UK distribution, ensuring that they would reach an audience they otherwise would not have had a chance to reach (vice versa for audiences in the UK coming to see the film); and second, exploring the role of paranoid and conspiratorial themes, feelings of anxiety and uncertainty, and expressions of disruption and precarity in these films as statements on, but certainly not limited to, artistic creation on the margins of the industry.

The Civil Dead presents probably the first natural challenge to these goals. It stands in especially sharp relief to some of the more serious films I programmed as a grad student (though I love them all, subconsciously I think this time around I was searching for films with a little more levity). Its creators, Clay Tatum and Whitmer Thomas, certainly don’t take themselves too seriously. One only needs to follow them on social media, listen to their podcast, peruse their other film and television work, or have a more than 5 minute conversation with them to know that. What, if anything, could their first feature film together have to say about the high-minded subjects Beyond Interpretation set out to confront?

As it turns out, a lot. In The Civil Dead Tatum plays Clay, a freelance photographer in a creative and professional rut. He’s in the kind of funk all too common among freelancers – apparently for Clay the guarantee of future opportunities is so uncertain that somehow a bold new haircut, comically outdated and to which his face is not suited, seems like a more promising business strategy than calling people who might be able to help him. Not even his famous acquaintances (Andy Samberg is named dropped more than once) have any work to offer him, or so Clay says. When his wife, Whitney (Whitney Weir, brilliant, grounded), who is far more understanding and forgiving of Clay’s foibles than he deserves, goes away for the weekend, she asks him to at least go out and take some photographs, just as a creative exercise. He dutifully agrees, but not before taking advantage of his alone time by drinking copious amounts of beer, moving their mattress into the living room, giving sham tours of their apartment to prospective renters to make extra cash on fake application fees, and generally vegging out.

Clay’s photography captures a generally grim view of Los Angeles, mounds of detritus littering the streets and unloved empty spaces fill his frames. It’s perhaps telling that the first real proof we see that Clay is a professional photographer, a published book titled “Trash in the River”, seemingly filled with similar images, is shown at a used bookstore where Clay exchanges books for extra cash. The brief scene of this exchange is characterized by a distinct coldness in the editing, which links Clay’s photography book, Clay’s face, and the bland, anonymous books he exchanges for money in a quick succession of isolated shots; their linkage inflicts a sense of bitter disappointment, a feeling that what he’s made is ultimately disposable and impermanent.

It makes a cruel kind of sense that Clay unexpectedly runs into an old friend, Whit (Whitmer Thomas), with whom he’s lost touch, while taking one of these seemingly disposable photos. The pair’s awkward reunion begins while Clay photographs an undignified pile of junk, specifically a dusty mattress with the words “5G KILLED MY DOG!!” emblazoned across it in red spray paint. Whit appears as might an apparition; the moment it happens and the space from which it occurs is unclear. Like Clay, we don’t notice him until he’s standing right in front of this pile of junk, blocking the shot. If John Wayne in The Searchers bursts forth from the frontier landscape as if he is the landscape itself, then there’s something to be said about Whit here, a similarly lost soul emerging out of a particular image of Los Angeles, himself a representative of Clay’s grim view of the city, and his presence in front of this abandoned garbage indicative of his own fallen state. This, of course, is no coincidence, and it is in this scene – this microcosmic encounter with and treatment of what has been forgotten, discarded, left behind – that the film’s thematic weight resides.

It turns out that Whit is a ghost, and only Clay can see, hear, or interact with him. It’s unclear just how long Whit has been dead, and the film doesn’t attempt to figure that out, but it’s been long enough that he’s not about to let go of this opportunity to feel somewhat human again. Tatum told me in a conversation we recorded for the film’s preview screening on 10 January in London, that The Civil Dead’s whole premise is based on a simple bit he thought was funny: what if you met a ghost, and instead of haunting you it just annoyed you? And it’s in this premise, and ultimately the way Tatum and Thomas go about embodying these characters – one miserably apathetic, the other desperately lonely, and both equally insecure – that the film’s comedy and tragedy arise. How do two men at odds with each other as much as they are in need of each other deal with the rapid fluctuations between these two states? And what, ultimately, will we do when faced with a choice to serve our self-interests at the expense of others?

– Chris Cassingham, Beyond Interpretation programmer